The Prophecies Trilogy (Omnibus Edition): A Dystopian Adventure

by Linda Hawley

  “Sinéad, dial Paul from the number he called me from. Send the call to my cell phone.”

  “Okay, Ann.”

  The phone rang, and I heard Paul pick up. “Hello?”

  “Hi, Paul. It’s Ann.”

  “Hey there.”

  “I was glad you called,” I said flatly.

  “Are you okay? You sound…different. Did everything go okay at the conference?”

  “The conference was fine. Would you like to come over? I could fix us a late dinner.”

  “Yeah, I can be right over,” he responded.

  “Okay.”

  “Ann?”

  “Yeah?”

  “You might need to tell me where you live. My telepathy isn’t quite working tonight,” he teased, trying to cheer me up.

  He has no idea.

  Chapter 23

  BELLINGHAM, WASHINGTON

  The Year 2015

  I threw together a green salad for us, with broiled organic chicken and roasted walnuts on top with Caesar dressing. Cooking was always good for centering myself.

  That’ll have to do.

  About twenty minutes later, the doorbell rang.

  I went to the door and opened it.

  Paul was dressed in a Bellslicker, a white t-shirt, and stone-colored boot-cut Levi’s. With his casual look, he wore a big smile and presented a bouquet of wildflowers from his hand.

  “Beautiful,” I said, impressed by the flowers.

  “Me or the flowers?” he asked playfully, returning my smile.

  “Both,” I said, stepping aside so he could enter. My heart leapt just a bit.

  “Thank you, Paul,” I said sincerely, holding the flowers in one arm while I hugged him with the other.

  He kissed me on the cheek just as we pulled apart.

  That was a surprise…but a pleasant one. I liked his forwardness.

  “How about we sit up here and eat?” I suggested, gesturing to the tall chairs at the kitchen island.

  Seeing the salad and bread, he replied, “Mmm…looks good.”

  He sat while I put the wildflowers in a vase, setting it on the counter.

  I dished up salad, bread, and pink lemonade for both of us.

  “So why don’t you tell me what’s up? I could hear something in your voice when you called me back.”

  “You get straight to the point, don’t you?” I asked, coming around the counter to sit next to him.

  “Ann, I’ve been working next to you five days a week for three years. That’s…” he was clearly calculating in his mind, “—seven hundred and eighty days I’ve spent with you. We’re a little past small talk now, don’t you think?”

  “Wow, you’re really good at math,” I said while winking, glazing over his question.

  “Ha ha.”

  For a moment I looked directly into my salad as though looking for something. I was gathering my thoughts.

  “I sure hope you’re ready for this, because it’s a doozy,” I warned, forking my salad.

  “Bring it on.”

  “I used to work for the CIA. Did you know that?”

  “Nope, didn’t know that. How long ago?” he asked, looking into his salad.

  I recounted the story of how I started working there. He nodded as he ate, indicating that he was still following me.

  “So,” I said, “I was there for a total of six and a half years.”

  “That’s a long time. What’d you do for them? Were you a spy—Bond?” he kidded.

  “Yes, I was,” I replied seriously.

  A piece of chicken fell off his fork. “Really?”

  “Yeah, but not in the way that you imagine. I never physically went into the field.”

  “Well that’s good. What did you do?”

  “I worked from CIA headquarters, in Langley. I was part of the Science and Technology group, in Clandestine Services. Our group developed the methods and technology to improve how we gathered intelligence. It’s the same organization that develops all the cool spy gadgets, like what James Bond uses.”

  “That is cool,” he said with eyebrows raised.

  “Of course you would think so, you geek,” I teased.

  He smiled. The way we interacted with one another was easy. I decided to dive into the more complicated stuff.

  “Can I ask you something?” I asked quietly.

  “Yeah, ask me anything.”

  “What do you think of our government?”

  “The U.S. government?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well, if we’re gonna get into politics, I need to know how old you are.”

  “What?” I asked, laughing.

  “Tell me how old you are.”

  “Why? How old do you think I am?”

  “Did the CIA teach you how to answer a question with another question?” he teased.

  I laughed.

  “No. As a matter of fact, I developed that myself—over forty-four years of lifetime.”

  “Forty-four? Really? I could have sworn you were under thirty-five.”

  “Yeah, I get that a lot,” I said, showing off.

  “Boy, you’ve got good genes,” he said, impressed.

  “My mother had good skin.”

  “I bet. Well now that I know you’re forty-four…” He winked. “You and I are the same age.”

  “Really?”

  “Uh-huh. It helps to know your age, because I can see where you’re coming from, knowing what period of time you’ve lived in.”

  “I can see that. It gives context.”

  “Yes, it does. Are you sure you want to know my opinion of our government? I mean, I’ve never worked for the government, nor would I ever. My feelings may be very different than yours.”

  “Yes. I asked because I want to know.”

  “I’m a patriot, Ann. I believe in this country,” he began.

  I noticed that his face changed as he started. There was no more bantering. It was all seriousness.

  “But I don’t believe in the socialization that’s been happening since about 2009. I’m against our government using RFID, whether it’s tracking animals, our medical records, or us. Local government, at the county and city levels, has become a noose around the neck of its citizens. The astronomical property and other local taxes are just plain wrong. The county foreclosed on my neighbor’s house for two thousand that he owed in back taxes, and his house is worth at least three hundred thousand dollars. I have another friend whose house is on a big piece of land, and yet he can’t keep livestock on his own land. His daughter wants to have chickens so that she can participate in 4H, and they are forbidden by the city to do so. They have sixteen acres, Ann. What happened to ‘we the people?’” He was getting fired up.

  I nodded. I had never seen this side of him; he seemed so different.

  Paul continued, “You know I love technology, but the things that all levels of government are doing with it is just plain wrong. We need change, from the highest levels of government.”

  He paused, waiting for my reaction to his confession.

  “I agree with every single word you just spoke,” I said, looking intently into his eyes.

  He met my eyes, then reached toward me and kissed me, full on the lips. I kissed him back. He gently stopped, leaning his forehead to mine. I told myself to breathe; the chemistry was palpable.

  He backed his head slightly away from mine and, looking into my eyes, said, “I knew you were beautiful, Ann. But I think you just became even more so.”

  “Mmmm,” I responded, unable to find any coherent words.

  He smiled.

  I drank my lemonade.

  He drank his and then ate a little salad.

  “I have a good friend who lives in a tiny city in Eastern Washington, and she can’t have chickens on her farm, and she lives on eleven acres,” I offered, trying to break the lively tension between us.

  “I’d like to take a million dollars, hire an attorney, and sue the crap outta that city, just for h
er right to keep some hens for fresh eggs.”

  “Her neighbor just turned her in to the county because they found a noxious weed on her farm. Now the noxious-weed person from the county is harassing her, saying that his team will come onto her farm and spray it with pesticides to kill the weeds and then charge her for it. So my friend got out her shovel and dug up those weeds, and now the county tells her that she’ll remain on their list forever and that they’ll be coming to her farm every year to inspect whether the weed is eradicated.”

  “That’s insanity,” Paul exclaimed.

  “It is. What’s incredibly ironic is that her county is millions short in their budget, and yet that noxious-weed person has a full-time job—harassing people like her. That job should be eliminated.”

  “That’s exactly what I’m talking about. The harassment of individual citizens is an epidemic. Did you know there could be neighbors, right now in this neighborhood, who could be listening to our conversation by having the right equipment they bought off the web? I consider it my constitutional right to have my privacy, and yet we’re losing it.”

  “Peekers.”

  “Yes, peekers. So you know about them?” he asked.

  “I do.”

  “Mmm, that’s interesting. You’re an interesting woman.”

  “I’ll take that as a compliment.”

  “You should. Since we’re both done picking over our dinner, do you want to sit on the couch?” he asked.

  “Sure.”

  “So are you allowed to tell me about your work for the CIA?” he asked as we sat down facing one another.

  “I can talk about some of it here, but not any specifics.”

  “Hmmm, okay.”

  “Remember the dream I told you about before I went to the conference in D.C.?”

  “Yeah. You were freaked out about it, with the quartz showing up. I’ve thought a lot about it since then.”

  “You have?”

  “Yeah, it was bizarre.”

  “I think I understand why it unnerved me.”

  He nodded, begging for more.

  “When I was in D.C., I met with my old CIA boss.”

  “Tryin’ to get your old job back?”

  “Very funny, but no. I was trying to understand why the government sent men to my friends in D.C., asking why I was recently in Shanghai.”

  “You went to China? When?”

  “That’s the thing. I’ve never been to China.”

  “Then why did they think you had? And which part of the government was asking?”

  “They were government contractors, hired by a certain agency, not the CIA. They thought I had been in China because I dreamed that I was in Shanghai.”

  I waited for his brain to catch up.

  Silence.

  He raised eyebrows…then recognition.

  “No way. They saw you dreaming of Shanghai?”

  “No. They saw me in Shanghai, as though I were actually there in real life.”

  Silence again.

  He was a bit slow in wrapping his head around it.

  “So you dreamed of being in Shanghai, and some government people, who presumably were spying on the same place in China, saw you. Then they started asking your friends why you were in China. The question is, what James Bond kind of technology allows them to see you as though you were there?”

  “It’s not technology—it’s people. People who are trained to use the subconscious part of their brains to find out information, without actually being there.”

  “Holy cow. Is that what you used to do?”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s serious stuff. You’re trained as a peeker without needing any technology.”

  “It doesn’t exactly work like that, but I can’t really explain it to you in detail. I would like to talk to you, though, about what’s been happening since that dream.”

  “Okay.”

  At least he’s open to listening to more, instead of running out of my house, screaming that I’m a spy.

  Looking at him intently, I said, “Warning…this is the scary part.”

  “Go ahead,” he replied steadily.

  “My training was like flexing a muscle that I didn’t know I had. I strengthened my subconscious and made it into a power-muscle that allowed me to travel using my mind without bounds to gather information. I was very, very good at what I did for the Agency. I was the best they had for the entire six years that I worked for them.”

  I paused to ensure he was following. He nodded, so I continued.

  “I flexed this muscle of my subconscious, and over all these years, I guess it’s been getting more and more powerful. When I had the dream of being in Shanghai, my subconscious crossed over into reality. The last thing I dreamed that night was that there was an earthquake beginning, and when I awoke, there had been. That’s why the Herkimer was there with me. In my conscious mind, I was really there. The government people saw me there. And I saw someone from that dream in my real life, here.”

  “Here in Bellingham?”

  “Well, here in the Pacific Northwest. I saw him and talked with him. He was real, and he remembered being there in Shanghai with me.”

  “Is that guy in the program, too?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Hmmm.”

  “So you really were there—in Shanghai, I mean.”

  “Yes, I was—but I traveled there through my dream.”

  “It’s kinda like teleporting,” he said, shaking his head.

  I nodded. I think he was starting to comprehend what I was explaining.

  “I also learned something from my old CIA boss that I never knew before.”

  “What’s that?”

  “My first live target for the Agency was the same physical location that I went to in my dream. But the thing is, I never knew until he told me in D.C. this week that those coordinates were that physical location. You see, at that time I only had latitude and longitude, so I didn’t know where the target was,” I rushed to explain.

  “That’s heavy stuff, Ann.”

  “I know.”

  “Just to clarify…whatever you dream, you can manifest in reality?”

  “Not always—I don’t think.”

  “Can you control it?”

  “No. I didn’t even know that those coordinates from twenty-five years ago were the coordinates for the very location that I dreamed in Shanghai.” I paused. “I might have killed all those people in Shanghai,” I confessed, looking into his eyes.

  “No you didn’t,” he firmly responded, reaching out to grip my shoulder.

  “I dreamed of the earthquake, but I might have actually created it,” I insisted, sharing my anxiety.

  “You didn’t. The CIA killed those people by opening your subconscious. They are responsible, not you. You can’t put this on yourself. You would never do that,” he argued, forcing me to look at him.

  I looked back at him silently.

  “Is the government still poking around your friends?” he asked me.

  “No. My old CIA boss put a stop to that.”

  “He’s still there after twenty-five years?”

  “No, he’s retired. Well, I guess no one ever retires from the CIA after being there so long. But he was able to convince the people who were asking the questions that they had made a mistake and that I was never there.”

  “Well, at least that’s good news.”

  “It’s the only piece of good news. There is one other thing I really should tell you.”

  “What’s that?” he asked with concern.

  “Every single person who did what I did for the CIA is dead.”

  “Dead as in killed, murdered?” he asked, stress in his voice.

  “No, natural causes, all of them.”

  “Natural causes? What do you mean?” he asked suspiciously.

  “The work we did caused psychosis in my closest friend from the project, and then he died of a heart attack a few months later. Others died of
early heart attacks without having any genetic history, and some others died of unusual cancers. I’m the only original team member alive.”

  “But your old boss…he’s alive,” Paul countered.

  “He ran the program, but he never…well…participated in what we were doing.”

  Paul’s face took on a pained cast.

  “I don’t think I’m in danger,” I responded to his worried look.

  “Why?” he asked, wanting me to prove it.

  “None of the others who died had the natural paranormal gifts that I do. They were all trained for the technique. But I already had it.”

  “What do you mean?” he asked again.

  His arm rested on the back of the sofa protectively, caressing my shoulder.

  “Are you familiar with astral projection?”

  “Like Shirley MacLaine?” he asked with his eyebrow screwed upward.

  I laughed out loud.

  “What?” he asked, unable to keep a straight face.

  I laughed until I was doubling over on the couch, unable to let the humor of it fall away. It brought me back to John O’Brien and how it had cracked him up when I had said it all those years ago.

  “What?” he said, clearly enjoying watching me.

  I started to calm myself. “Nothing. But that was just too funny. Never mind. Yes, like Shirley MacLaine.”

  He gave me a stern look that said I don’t like not getting the joke.

  I thought that was funny too—perhaps my laughter was a release of all my emotion.

  I continued.

  “Okay—astral projection. Since I was a young girl, I could leave my body at will. I had no idea that it was paranormal then.”

  He nodded.

  “Also, when I was twelve years old, I had a near-death experience, brought on by an accident I had. My family was visiting friends, and their children and my sisters and I were all playing on their frozen pond, pretending to be famous ice skaters. Our friends pulled out their three-wheeled ATV, driving it over the ice. I decided to grab the handlebar on the back, and as the driver accelerated, my hand slipped off, and I flipped backward, hitting the back of my head hard on the ice. It knocked me out cold.”

  I looked at Paul, who nodded for me to go on.

  “My spirit left my body, and I could see my body below, lying on the ice. I saw the kids move my body to the grass on the pond’s edge. I fell into a coma and woke up three days later in the hospital. While I was out of my body, both at the pond and at the hospital, I had experiences that I remember.”