sedona files - books one to three

by Christine Pope

  “All the more reason we should have a planning session,” Troy put in. “Kara filled us in a little bit about the entertainment business angle in all this. That’s partly why she called me and Justin.”

  “Oh?” I asked.

  “I used to work in the distribution arm at Universal. You need someone to help you track down where these tainted films and TV shows are being stored, right?”

  “Right,” I said. Of course the logical thing would be to keep that material as far away from the public as possible. Then I added, “Used to?”

  Justin grinned and patted Troy on the arm, and I realized in that moment their relationship was a little closer than just a couple of guys who teamed up to assist the UFO underground. “Troy played the Lotto for years. I always teased him about it. Last year he won big — so now we’re living a life of leisure, fighting for truth, justice, and the American way.”

  I glanced sideways at Paul to see how much of that he’d absorbed, and I could tell by a brief lift of his eyebrows that he’d figured out the situation as well. I found myself holding my breath, wondering if my newfound soulmate was going to turn out to be a secret homophobe. But he just smiled a little, as if to himself, before commenting, “Well, that’s handy. I’m sure Kara, et al. appreciate having someone full-time on the ground here in Los Angeles.”

  Troy practically beamed. “It’s been convenient, that’s for sure. Of course, we never had anything quite as hot as this before, right, Justin?”

  “No, nothing.”

  It would have been better if the situation weren’t quite so “hot,” in my humble opinion, but you had to play the hand you were dealt.

  We pulled into a parking lot then, and Troy maneuvered the Lexus through the narrow aisles and past groups of pedestrians, finally finding an open space at the edge of the lot, almost back out on the street. I wondered about him bringing us someplace so public. Then again, sometimes having a lot of witnesses was a good thing.

  I didn’t know if Troy or Justin had called ahead to get us a table, or whether they were favored regulars, but either way we were ushered to a table almost immediately, earning us some evil looks from the people waiting in the reception area. If I’d been in their position, I probably would have been irritated, too, but as it was I was just happy at the prospect of tea and something a little more solid in my near future.

  The waitress came and took our drink orders. We all waited until she was safely away.

  Paul said, “So do you have a plan?”

  Troy nodded. I noticed he had diamond studs in both his ears. “As I said, the best thing to do is block the films and shows at the distributors. There’s no way we can get to everything — too many indies out there these days — but my guess is that our friends upstairs aren’t interested in the art-house stuff. No, they’re probably more interested in getting their signal on the latest blockbusters and new installments of reality programming.”

  That made sense. Even narrowing the field, though, it seemed like a fairly daunting task. “So what do we need to do?”

  A pause, as Troy frowned and looked over at Justin, whose own expression was far from sanguine. “Well, it’s going to be complicated. There are six major studios in town, each with its own subsidiaries. And sometimes the subsidiaries have subsidiaries. Added to that, some stuff’s digital, while some is still on film reels. The TV shows are mostly digital. That’s a whole hell of a lot of hard drives we have to crash. It’s not as if we can just drive to a central warehouse, throw in a couple of Molotov cocktails, and have done with it.”

  Of course the waiter had to show up at that point. I got the impression that he’d heard the Molotov cocktail remark, but luckily all he did was set down our respective tea, coffee, and lattes, then ask in the most neutral tone possible if we were ready to order.

  I hadn’t even opened the menu, but I grabbed it and gave it a quick once-over as Troy and Justin saved the day by placing their orders first. By the time the waiter got to me, I’d recovered enough to calmly ask for a Belgian waffle with fresh strawberries and a side of scrambled eggs.

  He departed, and Paul said, “So I’m guessing this isn’t the sort of operation the four of us can pull off on — ” He stopped and gave Justin, who’d been staring at him with the oddest expression on his face, a quizzical look.

  “What?”

  “Dr. Oliver, are you wearing makeup?”

  “He’s got a shiner the size of Rhode Island,” I said calmly, stirring milk into my tea. “I thought it better to cover it up.”

  “Oh, right. Of course,” Justin returned, while Paul shot me a classic stink-eye. Well, I’d only been trying to help.

  “As to the matter at hand,” Troy forged on, with the air of someone who’d spent a lot of time dealing with Justin’s digressions, “yes, it’s going to take a lot of people. We’ve got a decent-sized contingent here in Southern California, but — ”

  “How many?” Paul asked.

  “Twenty, thirty I can really trust. A lot more hangers-on, people who like the excitement but who I wouldn’t want to rely on in a pinch, if you know what I’m saying.”

  “Is Jeff Makowski one of your inner circle?”

  Justin, who’d been pouring an extra dollop of milk into his latte, paused. “You know Jeff?”

  Uh-oh.

  “Yes,” Paul said evenly enough, but there was an edge to his tone that I’d begun to recognize. “Unfortunately, Jeff is compromised. Kara didn’t tell you that?”

  “No. I don’t think she knew.” Justin set down the little ceramic pitcher of milk and frowned in my direction. “Why didn’t you tell her?”

  “I was a little pressed for time,” I replied, and wished my stomach hadn’t knotted itself quite so badly. “Look, I told them the basics. We needed to get going and rescue Paul. If I’d known Jeff’s involvement was so important, I would’ve said something.”

  No one likes a fallible psychic, but even psychics are only human. We make mistakes. We don’t know everything. If you meet a psychic who says she has all the answers, she’s lying. Yes, we have a better feel for the pulse of energy or knowledge or whatever you want to call it that drives human affairs. But even that heightened awareness doesn’t allow us to make all the right decisions all the time.

  Paul reached under the table and gave my hand a reassuring squeeze. Just a quick touch, so fast I might have imagined it, but enough to let me know he was there, and he understood.

  “Piling on Persephone isn’t going to help,” he said. “She’s done an amazing job so far. I’d be dead if it weren’t for her. So let’s focus, all right?”

  “Right.” Troy glinted the briefest of sideways looks at his partner, as if to let Justin know it was time to back off. “Anyway, Jeff was the core of the network here. If he’s compromised, then there’s a good chance the conspiracists know the identity of everyone in the Los Angeles group.”

  For a few seconds everyone was silent. I swallowed some tea and said the words everyone was thinking and no one wanted to voice aloud. “Including you two.”

  Troy’s voice was steady as he replied, “Including us two.”

  I turned away from him to look out the window. Our table faced out on Ocean Avenue; I could see the dull gray of the Pacific, the swirl of the morning mists as they began to thin. And then, heading southbound on Ocean, a trio of black SUVs.

  “Paul,” I said in warning tones, and stood, scooting my chair backward over the tile floor with an ear-piercing screech. All around us, diners stopped to see what had made the noise.

  He looked over my shoulder and nodded, his expression grim. “Gentlemen, thanks for the coffee — and the information. But I think we’d better be going.”

  “Here,” Troy said, and tossed a set of keys to Paul, who caught them neatly. “There’s an exit down the hall by the bathrooms that lets you right out in the parking lot.”

  We didn’t bother with any thanks, but just moved as quickly as we could through the restaurant and out the b
ack door Troy had described. Luckily it faced away from Ocean, with the bulk of the restaurant between us and the street. I had to hope the MIBs would pull up in front and not waste time with a parking lot. After all, they had no reason to believe we knew they were on to us.

  Once we were out of the restaurant, Paul and I gave up any pretense of nonchalance and ran for the Lexus. He hit the remote when we were still yards away, and the doors unlocked, allowing us to jump inside and get moving without an appreciable pause. Since the vehicle had been parked at the far end of the lot, close to the side street that ran alongside it, we were able to pull out and head into the quiet residential district that lay in the blocks beyond Ocean.

  I twisted in my seat and looked backward. Almost at once I saw a dark SUV, but I had to force my heart out of my throat as I realized it was dark blue, not black, and had very unMIB-like surfboard racks installed on the roof.

  “Any sign of them?” Paul asked, turning down yet another side street.

  “No.” I twisted in my seat so I was more or less facing forward. “Do you know where you’re going?”

  “Not really. Does it matter?”

  “Well, if you want to get out of Santa Monica, turn right on Lincoln so you can head back to the freeway.”

  He didn’t reply, but wrenched the Lexus around the right I had indicated. The little glow-in-the-dark alien head hanging from the rearview mirror dangled wildly.

  “Paul?” I ventured. His jaw was set, his profile as he navigated down Lincoln Avenue grimmer than I had ever seen it. “Are you okay?”

  Silence again. I held my tongue as he waited at the interminable light that would allow us to turn left to get on the eastbound freeway.

  Once we were moving again, he finally spoke. “No, Persephone, I’m not okay. Every time we take one step forward, it’s two steps back. Now the network that was supposed to help us is all but useless. All we can hope is that our enemies are so bent on finding us that they won’t waste their time with people like Justin and Troy. Or Bettina Croft.”

  I’d almost forgotten about Bettina. I tried to reassure myself that they wouldn’t bother with her, that her money and her obvious position in society would protect her, but I didn’t know that for sure. Nothing told me I was wrong, no twinging of my funny bone or odd ache in my gut. I didn’t find that terribly reassuring, though. My instincts had been off more than I cared to admit.

  “So what do we do?” I asked. “Give up? Turn ourselves in?”

  “Don’t be ridiculous.”

  Only one of the most condescending phrases in the English language…and one I’d heard often enough throughout my life that I’d come to heartily hate it. “Well, with you talking like that, I’m not sure what to think.”

  He sighed then. “I’m sorry, Persephone. I don’t like feeling as if I don’t have the answers. But in this case, I truly don’t. And it seems we never get enough time to go anywhere and think.”

  Well, that was true enough. The three days since I’d met Paul seemed to be a blur of traffic and streets and freeways. Moving, always moving, and yet we barely managed to stay a jump ahead.

  “I know someplace,” I told him. “Keep heading east.”

  * * *

  SURROUNDED by the tranquillity of the Japanese gardens at the Huntington Library, it was hard to believe that such things as aliens and men in black and government conspiracies even existed. Paul and I found a garden bench near a wisteria arbor and sat down. Because it was a cool, pearly gray kind of Sunday, the gardens weren’t as crowded as they would be later in the year, when tourists would flock to see the roses and all the exotic plants. Right then, we could almost pretend we were the only two people there.

  I wouldn’t say the weight had entirely gone from Paul’s shoulders, but some shadow of care seemed to lift from his expression as he sat down next to me and stared off into the distance at the graceful arching bridge and sorrowful shapes of the weeping willows.

  “You could always take up a second profession as a tour guide if the whole psychic thing doesn’t work out,” he remarked.

  “Are you saying I’m not good at it?”

  “You know that’s not what I’m saying.” Again he reached out and gave my hand one of those reassuring little squeezes. “I just meant that you’ve done an amazing job of navigating us out of trouble.”

  “Well, I am a native,” I said, a bit mollified. “I just wish I could have done more to get us farther along. Thank you for being understanding, for realizing that just because I have some powers the general population doesn’t share, it doesn’t mean I’m the Great and Powerful Oz.”

  “I’ve met my share of psychics.” He smiled then. “Almost impossible not to, in the circles I’ve been traveling in lately. The more sure they were of everything they said, the bigger charlatans they turned out to be. If you think I’m angry or disappointed, I’m not. Well, not with you, anyway.”

  I nodded, a warmth that had nothing to do with the absent sun moving through me. At least Paul understood, and really, his was the only opinion I cared about at the moment.

  “So what next?” I asked. “Storm the gates of Sony, Universal, Columbia, et al.?”

  He smiled, but wearily, as if he wanted to acknowledge my quip but didn’t see all that much humor in the situation. “If I thought it would do any good. Unfortunately, I doubt we’d get past the security guards.”

  “It’s pretty horrible, if you think about it.” I hugged my arms against myself and stared out at the misty vistas of the formal gardens. So much for sunny Southern California. “I mean, even if Troy and Justin had been able to rally the troops and somehow destroy all that film and all those digital files, it would have been ruinous for Hollywood. It would have taken years for the studios to recover financially.”

  At that, he shifted toward me on the bench. The hazel eyes regarded me carefully for a few seconds. This close, I could see the faint layer of cosmetics in the one eye socket, with just the faintest smudge of bruise showing beneath it.

  “I didn’t even stop to think about that,” he said.

  I lifted my shoulders. “Well, I have a lot of clients who do the behind-the-scenes stuff. They’re always the ones who get hurt when there’s a strike or some kind of downturn in the business. People tend to think if you’re working in Hollywood you’re in clover, but it’s really not like that. Not for everyone, anyway.”

  His expression was still pensive as he nodded. “And it’s a consideration I suppose we’ll have to keep in mind…whatever we end up doing next.”

  “What about Kara and the rest of the gang in Sedona? I’m sure they’d come out here if we asked.”

  “It’s a possibility, but I’m certain they’re being watched. If they headed out to California, they’d just lead the conspiracists here.”

  I supposed he had a point. “There must be other groups — maybe up in the Bay Area — ”

  “I’m sure there are, but how are we supposed to contact them? I don’t — didn’t know anyone in the California network except Jeff. And he had reached out to me; I’m really not that active in those communities. It’s sort of frowned on, actually.”

  “Frowned on?” I inquired, not sure what he was getting at.

  Surprisingly, he smiled. “I’m sure the general public views the UFO community as one undifferentiated mass of nutcases, but, as in any other community, it has its own hierarchies. Those of us who are working to legitimize the field, who publish and do speaking engagements, tend not to get down in the trenches with the conspiracy theorists and the tinfoil-hat wearers. Jeff and I opened a dialogue awhile back because he had some interesting ideas, but, as I said, he sought me out. I didn’t know who any of his colleagues were. And even if I tried to locate some, I’m sure there are agents looking for just that sort of communication right now.”

  “So basically we’re screwed, no matter what we do next.”

  “In a nutshell.”

  I wanted to say something, give him some reassuring words
, but I found I had none. Instead I stood up, partly because the bench was beginning to feel a little damp, and partly because a restlessness had taken hold in me — born, I guessed, from the dead end in which we’d apparently found ourselves.

  That restlessness turned abruptly to icy fear, as I took in the landscape around us and saw three sets of men in dark suits converging on our location. No one wore a suit to the Huntington, not even on a cooler-than-normal March day.

  “Paul,” I said.

  Something in my voice must have alerted him, because he stood up immediately, his face paling beneath its tan as he took in the ominous shapes of those black-suited men. “Back toward the museum. Now.”

  And he grabbed my hand and dragged me after him as he took off at a run, those long legs propelling him forward along the gravel path. I didn’t look back, didn’t do anything except pour every ounce of strength I possessed into forcing my own feet to keep up, to will myself to a speed I didn’t know I could manage.

  In fact, I was so busy concentrating on following Paul that I didn’t notice the one agent until the last minute. A heavy hand wrapped around my upper arm, and something brutally heavy crashed into the side of my skull.

  The world went black.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  At first all I noticed was the sick taste in my mouth, and a dull thudding behind my right ear. Then harsh white light invaded my world as I opened my eyes.

  An unfamiliar voice said, “Ms. O’Brien.”

  I blinked, and saw a man wearing one of the familiar black suits standing a few feet away from me. We were in a room very similar to the cell I’d rescued Paul from — rock walls and floor, narrow little cot. I lay on the cot now, although I had no recollection of how I’d gotten there. A hybrid soldier stood guard at the door.

  “Ms. O’Brien,” the man said again.

  He had the sort of face you might pass in a crowd and never notice — not young, not old, not ugly, not handsome. His eyes were pale, his hair dark.

  I struggled to sit up, and nausea swirled through me. Digging my fingers into the edge of the cot, I managed to say, “I think I’m going to be sick,” before I was, right on the floor of the cell.