Proof Through the Night

by Lt. Colonel Toby Quirk

  “Could I bother you for just a sec, please?” She caught Firdos in the parking lot as he exited the store.

  Firdos said, “What do you want?”

  “I swear I bought two of these Red Sox hats, but here in my bag there’s only one.” She looked at his face.

  His eyes went right to her tank top and he said, “Do you have a receipt?”

  “Yeah, let me dig it out of the bag.” But before she reached into the bag, she nervously grasped the sunglasses hanging on the neck of her shirt and removed them.

  “Here.” She pulled the slip of paper from the bag and handed it to Firdos.

  “This says you only bought one,” he stated, and handed it back to her.

  “Oh, thanks. I’m such an airhead. I’ll have to get another hat. If I give something to one nephew, I have to give the same thing to his brother.” She attempted to connect with him, but his gaze remained fixed on her shirt.

  As she went back into the convenience store, Firdos lit a cigarette and began his walk to his family’s apartment on Essex Street. His mind fogged over and the voice of the woman seeped into his subconscious.

  “My name is Carlene. A mighty power has sent me to you. You will come with me and you will experience a new fulfilling life as a soldier in the Directorate’s army.”

  A silver Civic pulled up to the curb just ahead of Firdos, and the woman with the Red Sox hats opened the passenger side window and shouted, “Can I give you a lift? Hop in.”

  The sweet vanilla fragrance of Carlene Wood’s perfume swirled out from the Honda’s window and penetrated Firdos’ mind. He got into her car and never saw his family again. But now, finally, Firdos would fit in.

  Frances O’Donnell woke up smiling. She had found the Riverfront Hotel in North Little Rock, checked in, removed her business suit, pulled back the covers, lay down, and slept the sleep of the righteous. The drapes covering the south-facing window on her eighth floor room left a sliver of space where they came together, and a sharp blade of sunlight beamed through, painting a bright stripe across the width of her king-size bed. She sat up and studied it, kicking at the sheets, causing the line of light to ripple like a clothesline in the wind. Frances laughed at it, and then tried to remember the last time she laughed other than at someone’s demise.

  For ten years Frances woke up to pain, stiffness, nausea, and feeling like she hadn’t slept at all. In fact she had not slept through the night for ten years. The doctors called her condition fibromyalgia. They prescribed at various times Cymbalta, Lyrica, Savella, physical therapy, and medical marijuana. Nothing helped. They only made her sicker.

  Frances was coming to grips with the fact that last night, after meeting with Anna Stone and passing out in her waiting room, she had slept for—what time was it, ten-thirty, she missed her appointment with Anna, and now she laughed out loud—twelve hours.

  She stood up from the bed gingerly, expecting to feel the aches and stiffness that had become part of who she was. She took a step on the thick beige carpet. She walked over to where the thin line of sunlight fell on the floor and walked it like a tightrope walker. She grabbed the drapes and flung them open and let the blazing Arkansas sun radiate into her body. No pain. No discomfort. What did Anna Stone do to her while she was out? What drug did she give her? She walked back away from the big bed, took two running steps, and dove onto the sheets like a fourth-grader. Something fabulous had happened to her.

  Frances showered, ran her fingers through the snarls in her hair, and got dressed and ordered breakfast up to her room. She went to the window again and looked out on the Arkansas River with its six bridges. Traffic was flowing over the I-30 bridge from North Little Rock into Little Rock. Just to the east of the interstate was the Junction Bridge, a pedestrian walkway. Frances’ face went dark.

  On the south shore the Junction Bridge terminated at the William J. Clinton Presidential Library and Clinton Foundation.

  Her breath came in quick bursts as her mind went back to 1992. Frances was sixteen, waiting for her dad to drive her to school. The Time Magazine lay on the little maple table in the foyer of her parents’ home a few miles from the front gate of Fort McPherson, Georgia. Her dad, Sergeant Major Kenneth O’Donnell, had just returned from Kuwait, where he led Infantry troops against Saddam’s Republican Guards in the Gulf War.

  The sergeant-major’s battle gear stood against the wall in the foyer waiting for him to take it back to the post. His Kabar knife lay on top of his rucksack. The sheath was made of a coarse brown leather stitched around the edges with nylon thread, and there was a little rectangular pocket for a sharpening stone. Frances knew that the dark stain on the leather was from the blood of an enemy soldier.

  Her dad walked down the hall from his bedroom into the foyer in his sand-colored camouflage uniform and glanced at the cover of the Time Magazine—a portrait of then-governor Bill Clinton, announcing his candidacy for US president. Her dad, in a set of smooth, quick, unemotional moves, slipped the vicious-looking knife from its sheath, raised it to his shoulder, and rammed the point through the magazine, impaling it to the maple tabletop—right through candidate Clinton’s right eye. The sergeant-major then went to the coffee pot in the kitchen and poured himself a cup—black.

  Frances jerked the handle back and forth, left and right, finally dislodging it from the table and Clinton’s face. She returned it to its sheath and snapped the strap in place. The gash in the table remained.

  Staring out over the Arkansas River at the expansive edifice built to honor the man reviled by Frances and her father caused a dark curtain to fall over her joyous mood.

  A knock at her door announced the arrival of her breakfast. “Room service.”

  Frances opened the door. The woman pushing the stainless steel serving cart loaded down with two breakfast services was not a member of the hotel staff. It was Anna Stone.

  “Good morning, Sarah, how did you sleep?” asked Anna.

  A faint smile suggested itself onto Frances’ lips. “Well, good morning, Anna,” Frances replied, trying to conceal her amazement—and her delight. Her surprise at Anna Stone’s presence in her room was somehow mitigated by the surreal events she had experienced the day before.

  “I assure you I am as surprised as you are,” said Anna. “And I’m as interested in how all these events are going to play out as you are. So how I came to know where you are staying, how I found myself in the hotel kitchen when they got your call for room service, and how I convinced them to let me deliver it to your room—all beyond me, but here we are, sister, so let’s see what we know.”

  Anna and Frances sat at the round hotel table with two orders of scrambled eggs, toast, sausage, home-fried potatoes, grits, pancakes, fruit, and coffee. The two women surveyed the morning feast like commandos reconnoitering an enemy objective. Frances looked up at Anna and said, “Attack.”

  Henry heard his wife call, “Hey, babe, come in here. I’m getting something.”

  He reluctantly tore himself away from his unfinished security plan on the computer. Twenty-five years of marriage taught him to control his angry outbursts.

  “What?” he snarled.

  “Okay, I have to keep both my hands on my head to get what’s coming to me, and I need you to write down what I’m getting here. Would you?”

  Henry pulled his notebook from his breast pocket and unclipped the pen from the cover. “Shoot,” he said.

  “Right, here we go: Riverside Hotel, North Little Rock, Arkansas, countermeasures. Scramble the color coding of the signals radiating from woman in room 562. Move color spectrum five shades to the right,” Sandy dictated. “Add the time and date, hon.

  “Okay,” she continued. “Now sending information to Anna Stone: ‘Frances works for the Directorate whose diabolical mission is to control every established institution in the US. Tell her you know that and the chairman’s name is Akebe Cheron and the name of his yacht is Medusa.’”

  “Where you getting this stuff?” asked Henry.
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  “No idea,” she said, “but we just messed up somebody’s plans.”

  Andrew watched on screen number 4 the image of the roof of the Riverside Hotel in North Little Rock. His satellite imaging device picked up telekinetic radiation that he had programmed into Frances when she was in his ops center.

  Andrew decoded the colors from the hotel roof and read the message, “Frances is following Directorate orders, accomplishing mission.”

  Having no longer any need to monitor Frances, Andrew clicked over to monitors three, seven, and eight, and directed the actions of his six squads of seers and operators. Squad Alpha in Phoenix, Bravo in Burlington, Vermont, Charlie and Echo in Washington DC, Delta in Boston, and Foxtrot held in strategic reserve.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Anna Stone paused and watched the veil of astonishment fall over Frances’ face. Frances took a sip of coffee and said, “How do you know Akebe Cheron?”

  “And he has a lovely, luxurious yacht named Medusa,” Anna added. She tried the grits with butter.

  Frances dropped her utensils, sat back against the back of her chair, folded her arms across her chest, and asked, “Just what is going on here, Anna?”

  Anna Stone’s eyelashes draped down over her eyes and she concentrated on the instructions filtering into her mind. She took a deep breath and let it out slowly through pursed lips.

  “It seems, Frances, your chairman has hypnotized and brainwashed you. Your brilliant mind and your intense patriotic drive made you very attractive to the Directorate and they assimilated you into their organization through a very sophisticated system of mind control. However, the Directorate has a tenacious enemy that protects those courageous, mindful professionals that your board of billionaires target for assassination. Somehow, they recruited me and assigned me the mission to set you free. And there’s more.”

  Anna admired Frances’ stately figure as the wealthy executive stood and marched to the window overlooking the Arkansas River. Minimal makeup, streaks of grey in the auburn hair, and an understated wardrobe showcased her natural handsomeness. The late-morning sun arched higher over the urban valley below. Traffic streamed east and west on I-40 and flowed ambitiously on the surface roads in and out of Little Rock.

  “My dad and I were very close,” Frances began. “He was a warrior in the US Army Special Forces. They wanted him to go to college and become an officer, but he knew precisely what he was cut out for—leading small teams in close combat, not directing the fight from a distant command post. He was brilliant. Often much smarter than his commanding officers, but he never flaunted it. When he was deployed he sent me long letters. I could publish them as a tome to integrity, courage, and strong moral character. But I never would.

  “Our political leadership devolved deeper and deeper into the collection of bought-and-paid-for cartoon characters that we now have in our government, and my dad became more and more incensed. As a perfect soldier he never expressed or displayed his discontent, but in his letters to me he raged hot and angry about the decline of the nation for which he constantly offered his life. He wrote, ‘A man can justify giving his life for his country only if it’s a good country. And a country is only good when the people are good.’

  “He pulled the plug at his twenty-third year, and he lost his identity. His spirit shriveled up as his body bloated up with binges of crappy food, beer, and bourbon. I watched him slowly crumble from the strongest, bravest man in the world to a pitiful, sloppy pensioner, and then to the grave in two short years. The way his life ended devastated me, and I focused my visceral hatred at the White House gang from this city and their left-wing coconspirators.”

  “My hatred for our government, our education system, our health care institutions, our so-called entertainment industry, and every business enterprise, even the shallow, self-indulgent values that Americans have adopted, swelled up inside me until I felt I would explode under the emotional stress. My own overeducated, overachieved life tasted rotten to me when I looked in the mirror. The Directorate offered me the opportunity to fix it. They seemed to have the power, Anna, to cleanse the country of all the individuals that obstruct the natural flow of intelligent control.”

  The young woman silently watched Frances gaze alternately out the window then down to the carpet, as if she were reading her reveries from the carpet and clarifying them from the sky. She stopped, poured herself a second cup of coffee, and sat down across from Anna at the table. She cocked her head to the left and looked at Anna.

  “Somehow, someone connected me with you. It seems this other force, this enemy of the Directorate, has some kind of paranormal power to thwart their plans.”

  “Hmmm. That may explain some of my recent phenomena,” said Anna.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well,” Anna said, “You must know that I stopped driving on Route 167 the other day and avoided a bridge explosion that would have killed me. I had this notion that a voice—no, not a voice—an impression, I guess told me to stop and help this lady and child sitting on the guardrail. But they disappeared. None of the other people even saw them. Made me wonder if they were just some figment of my imagination. Or something else.

  “Then, when you showed up in my office yesterday,” Anna was recalling the sensations she felt the day before, “I know I was operating under the influence of a spiritual power way beyond my understanding. Even the words coming out of my mouth weren’t mine.”

  “So,” interrupted Frances, “What was going on when you put your hand on my back?”

  “Oh, that. Well, I guess under the power of this Spirit I must have possessed the ability to heal you. It’s in the Bible—the gift of healing. How do you feel?”

  “I feel totally pain-free.” Frances put her elbows on the table, her head in her hands. Her tears flowed and her voice cried out. Anna watched Frances’ hidden misery rise off her like the fog lifting off the Arkansas River down below.

  Frances took several deep breaths.

  “I think I’ll try these grits,” she said with a new voice.

  “Just put a little butter on ‘em,” Anna advised. “Some people use the maple syrup.”

  Frances took a small bite and scowled. “Not a fan,” she said, and drank some coffee.

  “So now what?” Anna asked.

  “Well, neither of us knows much,” Frances said, “but I know this: if the operations officer of the Directorate—a very smart, very gross young man named Andrew—could effectively monitor our meeting this morning, we would have had some very violent visitors by now. I know he has the capability to monitor us, but there must be someone with the power to mask our words and actions so he can’t see or hear us. You know anything about that?”

  “Nope,” said Anna, working on her eggs and toast. Then Anna asked, “Why go after me?”

  “Look,” Frances said, “I realize that you have been instrumental in opening up my eyes and relieving me of a very painful disease. I have the utmost respect for you. I need to take some time to process all this and see what I’m supposed to do. I’m not ready to go into detail about how you were targeted or all the insane plans this organization has on the table. I know we will be seeing each other again. But for now, let’s just finish this pile of unholy food and go about our separate lives. Okay?”

  Anna received a notion deep in her subconscious that she was done here.

  “Okay. Let’s eat.”

  Henry was amazed. He wondered aloud, “What just happened here, babe?”

  Henry looked out the east-facing window of the tower that topped a silo-looking addition on the corner of the house. It was designed to emulate a lighthouse, but it didn’t quite make it.

  He could see old Gabriella sitting on one of the stone cubes out on her granite outcropping below the cliff. The aged woman, rigid, unmoving, could have been a statue carved out of the same stone on which she sat.

  Sandy turned to her husband and said, “It appears that God is imparting to me some of the power that Nonina
possesses.”

  Henry looked at Sandy with a glazed stare. Here it comes again. I know she can see it. I can’t control what it does to my insides, but I can control how I react. Sandy is getting involved in a very dangerous game here, and I’m being dragged in too. Sit tight, boy. Be still and listen to your wife.

  “And, apparently you don’t have to sit out there in all kinds of weather,” Henry said, trying to lighten this profoundly disturbing revelation about his wife.

  “I get it up here in the tower, she gets it out there on the rock.”

  “So what are you ‘getting,’ my dearest darling weirdo?” So far, I’m doing all right. Hope I can hold it.

  “Yeah,” she laughed, “I’m weird, all right. And mighty proud of it.

  “What I’m getting, Henry, is this ability to perceive activity in distant places. And I’m getting a supernatural power to transmit some kind of impulses that influences the action in those places.

  “See, in this case, Anna Stone, the young chiropractor whose life Nonina saved last week, has made a connection with one of the chief leaders of the enemy’s power structure, this Frances O’Donnelly. Evidently Anna has a gift of divine healing, and she prayed for Frances’ fibromyalgia to be healed and God did it. As a result, Frances was open to having a conversation with Anna, and possibly having a relationship with her. So I guess Nonina arranged a meeting with the two women and it appears that Frances may be coming out from under the insidious brain-washing of the enemy. I suspect Nonina will be using her as a spy in the enemy’s camp.”

  “So what’s your next move, thy awesome prophetess?” and Henry bowed deeply at the waist in not-so-mock adoration.

  Sandy gave him a smack on the head. “Rise, you unclean serf,” she commanded. “I don’t think I have any control over what I’m supposed to do. I’m just going to be open to these paranormal signals and respond and react. Does that seem reasonable to you?”