“It is just another example of the completely unexplained nature of this phenomenon that has been sweeping the world,” Rick said solemnly.
Cornelia could hear the tension, the rawness of nerves in his voice.
“In broad daylight, on busy streets,” Rick went on, “a globe appeared. At just the right moment, at just the right precise spot no one was looking, a twenty-ton granite globe somehow shows up. Again, at a precise spot on a street where no security, traffic, or surveillance cameras are looking, at a time when no pedestrians are walking nearby, one of the mystery globes somehow appears. The closest person to the globe, from what we’ve heard so far, was a motorist who took his eyes off the road for a moment to adjust the radio in his car. The next moment, when he looks up, the street in front of him is blocked by a globe. He hits the brakes, he just about misses a collision…except he gets rear-ended.”
And then he hits the globe, Cornelia almost whispered.
“Just imagine how perfectly this massive object was placed at just the right spot, down to the exact square inch, where it could stand still in the level intersection, yet close enough to the extremely steep Powell Street to start rolling once that car made the slightest contact.”
Matt Cooper was getting a long-shot of Powell, Cornelia noticed. The street climbed up one of San Francisco’s many precipitous hills.
“From what police investigators could tell from the damage to the car,” Rick explained, “its driver was barely moving at the speed limit. He had, just as he told the investigating officers, almost completely avoided a collision had he not been struck from behind and his vehicle not pushed forward and into the globe. Yet that slightest impact started the globe rolling down the hill.”
Where it derailed a cable car, putting twelve people in the hospital with critical injuries, Cornelia recalled the latest report of what had ensued an hour before she and her Confirmation teammates landed in San Francisco. After crashing into the cable car, the globe pinballed off to its left, crashing nearly head-on into a sedan. The car’s driver managed to survive the accident with only a sprained shoulder. But the globe then smashed two parked cars and nearly killed a bike messenger who had been speeding down the street. Startled by the destruction just a few feet behind him, the biker lost his balance, wiped out, broke his arm and his nose, and received a concussion as he rammed head-first into the ground. From there, the globe rebounded toward the right side of Powell, striking yet another parked car. This one inexplicably exploded. The car’s driver was killed. Two pedestrians were burned as a result. Five more people were showered and badly lacerated by flying glass and metal debris. Then the globe rebounded yet again….
Cornelia’s pulse pounded as she imagined the chain of events.
…The globe rebounded toward the left of the street and into another row of parked cars. One of the cars belonged to Sarah Robinson. She had just parked moments before, and was still behind the wheel when the globe struck. She would die from her massive head-injuries at San Francisco General Hospital.
The globe eventually came to a rest at the bottom of the hill, at the Hallidie Plaza cable-car turntable.
4.
Cornelia and her group were granted access to the San Francisco General Intensive Care Unit waiting room by Sarah’s father. With the rest of the media clamoring all over the hospital, security was keeping as tight a seal on access as possible now.
Cornelia had told her partners not to bring any of their cameras inside. They all agreed. Now was not the time.
They had all been taken by the throngs of reporters down in the lobby, Cornelia knew. They saw all the news vans in the parking lots. San Francisco had just seen the first serious injuries and the first two deaths attributable to the globes. Everyone was looking for a scoop. Cornelia and her partners were lucky to get this access. But none of them said it out loud.
When they got to the waiting room, they were surprised to find Colonel Robinson and another air force officer in the small, bare-bones enclosure. The room’s furnishings consisted of two couches, a table with four chairs, and a TV set on the wall. Cornelia wondered if the relatives of other patients had somehow been persuaded to leave.
“Cornelia,” Robinson said simply as she walked into the room.
Garret Robinson had the sort of sinewy, strong-chinned, masculine features of a soldier who would have looked perfect on a recruiting poster. But now he looked haggard, spent. With his uniform jacket removed and loosened tie, he was but another grieving father, not a tough leader of men.
“Garret,” Cornelia said softly. “I’m so sorry.”
She noticed Robinson’s gaze sweep over her colleagues as they entered behind her. They all said their quiet greetings solemnly and respectfully. But Cornelia wondered if Robinson might have been trying to figure out the capacity in which she had come to see him. Was she there as a family friend? he might have been thinking, or as an opportunistic journalist? She didn’t blame him, of course. It made her feel unclean, disloyal. Moreover, no matter that the globes had now become the number-one news story around the world and they were working on pursuing information the public had a legitimate right to know, Cornelia still had a hard time thinking of herself as a journalist again.
Nonetheless, Robinson came up to her and gave her a hug. “I know,” he said.
Cornelia noticed the other man nodding at the Confirmation team members. Around thirty-years-old or so, he had the sort of ex-prep-school look of a yuppie. Cornelia wondered if he might have been the air force version of a P.R. man, watching over Garret to make sure he said the right things to the media. His name tag read “Burns.” His rank insignia was that of a captain.
“I think we all better get out of here,” Robinson said after a beat. After another pause, he glanced towards Burns for a moment. “I know your team has a lot of questions for me….”
“I’m here because I’ve known Sarah and I’ve known you since I was fifteen,” Cornelia said as delicately as she could. “I’m a friend now. This isn’t show biz.”
“I appreciate that,” Robinson said firmly. “But the fact is that I have a lot to say. About Sarah. About the way she died. And about these clowns running around out there claiming we, the air force, the military, the government, the force of the great global conspiracy, are somehow behind this.”
Cornelia was taken by his candor. But she could see that it was a cold, hard, furious candor.
“Let’s go,” he said, and grabbed his jacket off the back of one of the chairs.
Hospital security provided them a way out of the hospital through a series of utility corridors that would take them first to an ambulance garage and then on the shortest path to the parking lot. That way they stood the best chance of avoiding the news crews.
“If the military’s behind this, we’re obviously not doing a good job of protecting ourselves, are we?” Robinson said bitterly as their service-elevator doors slid open on the first floor.
So the colonel really was as eager to talk as he claimed, Cornelia realized with some surprise. His grief was obviously mutating into anger and indignation. Although they couldn’t record the moment, Cornelia let him talk.
“I don’t know what the hell is going on,” Robinson continued, striding out of the elevator, “and I don’t know anyone who does. But seeing how these things keep turning up virtually every day now, all over the world—in the middle of a goddamned city street, for Christ’s sake—I guess we’d better start figuring it out.”
Cornelia thought she noticed the other air force man, Burns, nodding ever so slightly as Robinson spoke. She guessed he looked glad that Robinson said what he did, rather than glad that he was following some prearranged script. The words coming out of the colonel still carried the tone of a grieving, angry father. And besides, for as long as Cornelia had known the man, he had never struck her as the type who could be easily cowed by the bureaucratic party line.<
br />
“Do you understand what I’m saying?” Robinson said, and shot a look at Cornelia. “Whatever is going on here…. Well, someone who’s a lot smarter than I am—some physicists or mathematicians, or astronomers at Harvard or MIT or Princeton or wherever we can get a hold of those people—had better come up with some real answers real soon, and we’d better listen to them instead of pretending we know all the easy answers about conspiracies.”
Cornelia was about to tell him that she was interested in the truth as Robinson saw it and not some confirmation of prefabricated conspiracy theory narratives, but Dan Knight beat her to the punch. “That’s exactly what we’re interested in, Colonel,” he said quickly. “Your story, not another X-Files flashback.”
“Oh, and one more thing,” Robinson said curtly. “Don’t expect me to look for a greater purpose behind Sarah’s death,” he added a short beat later. Cornelia noticed the bile tingeing each of his words. “It’s only been a couple of hours since that globe rolled down that hill, and we already have some assholes out there talking about a greater purpose.”
5.
“What greater purpose?” Lacy asked when they were back at the Omni San Francisco Hotel.
Jerry had them book their rooms after Sarah’s invitation to San Francisco, yet none of the team had set foot inside their suites yet. Even now they sat around two tables that had been pushed together in the Omni’s steak house. They were close to crashing from exhaustion after the day’s events, and they needed some food to reenergize and time to get some perspective on what they found themselves in the middle of.
“They’re referring to that exploding car,” said Knight, and glanced up from his laptop.
Both the professor and Rick had their computers in front of them, and ceaselessly surveyed the Internet for every development, analysis, and commentary on what had happened on Powell Street.
Knight’s gaze almost drifted to the camera on the tripod on his right side by the far end of the table. Matt had secured one of the cameras on one end of the tables, while Tony held the other one in his hand, covering the discussion at the table.
Cornelia had her iPad in front of her, but could no longer focus her attention well enough for effective net-surfing. Exhaustion, which had hit her like a body-blow the moment she sat down, coupled with the orange/red glow of a fading twilight bathing them through the restaurant’s windows, was having its way with her, and she knew better than to fight it right now.
“It was a bomb,” Knight exclaimed.
Everyone’s gaze was fixed on him in that instant. The old man, though, stared at his computer screen as if he couldn’t believe what he was reading. “The driver of the car had a bomb with him,” Knight said a moment later, then paused once more. He met no one’s eyes.
Cornelia wondered if she heard a strange, inexplicable taint of bitterness in his words.
“Yeah,” Rick mumbled before Knight could say anything else. They, apparently, were looking at the same information. “Because the guy was an enforcer for a Triad boss,” he said with louder, more pronounced words this time.
“Triad?” Melinda asked. Since Lacy sat between her and Rick, she quickly tried to crane her neck to get a glimpse of his laptop. “As in…?”
“As in Chinese organized crime.” Rick paused and cast a quick glance at Knight, as if to see if he had anything to add.
Knight was perusing his laptop screen too intently to say anything.
“We seem to be dealing with a hitman who was kept from his target,” Rick said, and took the time to look at everyone around the table. He even afforded a glance at Matt and his camera. “Cops say the target was Judge Ronald Belknap.”
“Was this guy in the car on trial or something?” Ian asked.
“His boss was,” Rick said. “But our hitman,” he continued, pausing only for a moment to refresh his memory off the computer screen, “is the late Johnny Lo. Real nasty piece of work. Loan shark. Extortionist. Suspected in at least four gangland killings. Two of them went to court, but he beat the rap on both. Until this morning he was in the employ of the man standing trial in Judge Belknap’s courtroom for heroin smuggling: one-time star of the silver screen and the bottom of Hong Kong pop charts, Philip Cheung Chen-Sun. In case the name doesn’t ring any bells, he is better known by his stage name from the late seventies: Bruce Cheung.”
“Sorry, it still doesn’t ring any bells,” Cornelia said. She wasn’t sure where Rick was going with the organized crime trivia, but she was too tired to even try and guess.
“Hey, wait a minute!” Ian exclaimed with something between real and mock astonishment. “The Seven Fists of Death.”
Lacy cocked an eyebrow with a confused look. “Dude! What are you talking about?” Cornelia could tell that Lacy, too, was too drained by the day for these guessing games.
“Classic Bruceploitation grindhouse cinema,” Ian shot back brightly, then looked at Rick. “Am I right, man?”
“Impressive. Bit before your time.”
“Bro, I’m a classic-film buff.”
“Cheung used to be an actor,” said Rick. “One among dozens of Bruce Lee imitators. And yes, The Seven Fists of Death was his big-screen debut. Financed by his father, a chieftain in Hong Kong’s Shadow Tiger Triad.”
“And now Bruce Cheung is a gangster in San Francisco?” Melinda asked.
“Well” Rick said. “As lavishly as his father spent on the production of Fists of Death in seventy-seven, Junior didn’t quite become—as he was billed—’The New King of Kung Fu.’”
“Despite the numerology?” Knight asked sardonically.
Ian laughed. “Seven Fists of Death released in seventy-seven.”
“Despite that,” Rick said, “Seven Fists of Death didn’t set the world box office on fire.”
“Or even the Hong Kong box office,” Ian chimed in.
“Yeah. It was a bomb. As were Bruce Lee’s Vengeance, Dragon Master—”
“Bruce Lee’s Vengeance?” Lacy asked, incredulous. “You can not be serious.”
“Don’t knock it!” Ian shot back. “The quality of the martial arts was much better than you’d expect.”
After a long, rueful look, Lacy repeated, “Bruce Lee’s Vengeance?”
“Bruce Cheung played a champion race-car driver who stumbles onto a Japanese conspiracy behind Bruce Lee’s death.”
“I guess I better get the DVD for that one,” Lacy said. “So how do we go from Hong Kong chop-socky to San Francisco?”
“Well,” Rick said, “as you might guess, Bruce Cheung’s show biz career didn’t really work out. This despite the fact that in 1978 he tried to jump on the post-Star Wars sci-fi craze and made Interdimensional Kung Fu. Costarring fellow Z-grade leading man, Hong Kong Lee.”
“I’m not gonna ask what that one was about,” Lacy said, glancing at Ian, barely suppressing a grin.
“Something tells me you’re about to find out,” Melinda said, and chuckled.
Although Cornelia was just about on the verge of frustration with their banter, she could understand it. They had all been worn down by this day. Kidding around like this helped cut the tension for everyone.
“Bruce Cheung and Hong Kong Lee together in one picture?” Matt said, and laughed. “Dude, that’s like Pacino and DeNiro in the same film.”
“It was an unappreciated classic, right?” asked Knight.
“Hong Kong Lee was an alien bent on world domination,” Ian explained, “but he first needed to eliminate all of the greatest martial artists who might stand in his way. And he almost succeeded, were it not for Bruce Cheung mastering a secret style of fighting. The interdimensional kung fu technique!”
“Why am I so nervous sitting at the same table with you?” Lacy asked with the perfect deadpan.
There were laughs all around.
“Sadly,” Rick said, “not only was C
heung’s acting career a bust, but he didn’t fare much better as a Canto Pop singer.”
“That’s too bad,” Knight said with mock pity.
“I bet,” Cornelia said, and looked at Rick, “the entertainment world’s loss was the underworld’s gain, right?”
“You got it. When Bruce Cheung crashed and burned, Philip Cheung Chen-Sun did just fine in the family business. Heroin smuggling, prostitution, loan-sharking, gun-running. He was a virtuoso hood his father could always count on. Then, in 1992, shortly after taking full reigns of the Triad, he started relocating the organization’s investments in fear of the 1997 takeover of Hong Kong by mainland China.”
“And he seems to have made out well in San Francisco,” Knight added, then paused with a graven, uncomfortable look on his face. At length, he said, “Until we get some supernatural intervention.”
No one replied for several moments.
Finally, Melinda said, “So this globe starts rolling down that hill, hitting things, bouncing left and right like a giant pinball, and then it hits Johnny Lo’s car and blows it up. We’ve got some incredible odds in play here.”
“Yeah, don’t we?” Knight said with a bitter edge to his voice.
“Because,” said Melinda, “Johnny blows up with the bomb intended for the judge. And now Bruce Cheung’s trial will go on….”
“And maybe justice will be done,” Cornelia cut in. While she paused, no one said a word. They all knew what she was implying. Nevertheless, she made it explicit. “Criminal mastermind Cheung might go to prison at last…except Sarah dies in the middle of all the destruction.”
“Yeah,” Lacy replied quietly. “And dozens of other people are injured and maimed in the process too. There sure seems to be a benevolent force at work here, don’t you think?”
Cornelia saw Knight giving Lacy a long, knowing look.
Confirmation Page 9
