Except she couldn’t keep her mind from wandering back to the “globes as engines of fate and karma” stories that had hit the papers and the web since the destruction on Powell Street. Could this have been her real share of karma? Cornelia turned the thought over in her mind, but didn’t like it. She wanted to push the idea away as forcefully as she could, hoping to focus on the feelings Rick stoked in her instead, but circumstances wouldn’t allow it. Cornelia had never believed in the concept of karma until now anyway, and she didn’t want the Powell Street incident to change her mind. She would have preferred to have her proximity to Rick make her a believer. What forces of destiny would want to reward her by killing Sarah?
“Theatrical documentary, huh?” Cornelia said at length, and cast a glance at Rick with a dramatically raised eyebrow. “But do you know what I’ve heard?” She paused and teased him with the silence.
“Huh?”
“Book deals for us as well! You ready to write a book?”
Rick coughed forth a sudden burst of laughter. “Me? A book? Come one, I’m just a street cop.”
“Back in L.A. you got shafted as much as I did.”
Cornelia saw some of the good humor melting off Ballantine’s face, just as she’d thought it might.
“I was fired from my show. It happens, right?” he said with cool understatement. But Cornelia knew for a fact that he, too, had gotten cheated out of jobs twice already. Yet he refused to complain about it.
“It was more than that,” she said. “The L.A.P.D. turned its back on you as much as Stewie Corcoran and WRND screwed me over.”
As Cornelia had learned, Rick’s life had started veering from law enforcement to show business when his squad car had been summoned one night to intervene in a fight—and possible rape—at one of the cottages of the Chateau Marmont on Sunset Boulevard. When he and his partner, Steve Gaines, arrived at the hotel, they overheard chaotic noise inside the locked cottage. The Marmont staff and security had been afraid to intervene, as the instigator of the ruckus inside might possibly have been holding his victim at knifepoint. It was best to let the professionals disarm the situation.
The melee inside was a college graduation party that had gone to hell. As subsequent news stories would reveal, the head partier—and suspected rapist—was one Llewellyn Barclay of the Beverly Hills oil family. Young Llewellyn had previous run-ins with the law, stories would later elaborate, ranging from a series of drunken fistfights to a “possession with intent to distribute” drug charge against him during his freshman year at Pepperdine University. But not only had the law never punished him beyond a couple of hours of community service (for the drug charge), neither did his family. Kids in the Barclays’ social circles, a People magazine cover-story would detail, didn’t get punished; they were sent to therapy. Thus, after the drug incident, Llewellyn was once again sent to a clinic in Palm Springs where a psychologist was supposed to help him analyze his feelings. As the Chateau Marmont incident demonstrated, Llewellyn Barclay had still not yet understood his feelings for vicious antisocial behavior even by his senior year in college.
After Rick and Steve kicked open the door of the cottage, they found Llewellyn in a hysterical fit and swinging a chair around the room. His victim, a fifteen-year-old Hollywood High School sophomore, was cowering naked under a table, her eyes swollen shut from a couple of Llewellyn’s punches. By then, his three Pepperdine-grad friends, who had originally been partying with him, had decamped. One of them, it would later be revealed, had enough of a troubled conscience to call the police when it looked like a drunken and PCP-fueled Llewellyn was going out of control.
Llewellyn’s arrest itself was not difficult. Rick could easily subdue him and was just about to put the cuffs on him. Except Rick’s problems began when Llewellyn did not exercise his Constitutionally guaranteed right to remain silent. Instead, the scion of the Barclay family unleashed a string of taunts at his victim, promising her that he would not spend a second in jail because of his money and his family’s connections in both Sacramento and Washington D.C. A moment later Llewellyn took a clumsy swing at Rick. Reacting purely on instinct, Rick jabbed a fist into the middle of Llewellyn’s chest. That jab’s precision delivery was ensured by Rick’s boxing skills and strength he had built up as a competitive weightlifter in college. The kid, in turn, went down from the punch like a sack.
As the L.A. County Coroner’s Office later reported, the punch stopped Llewellyn’s heart on impact. The reason it was so easy to fell him, the report explained, was a combination of an undiagnosed heart condition and previous damage done by his drug use. But even before the coroner released his findings, Rick’s fate was sealed by a mistake on his part…and then by the Internet.
Going into Llewellyn’s cottage, neither Rick nor Steve Gaines had turned on their body cameras. In sexual assault cases, the concern over the victims’ privacy had come to trump the public’s demands for oversight of the police in the field. No cops had ever gotten into trouble for not turning on their body camera when dealing with a rape victim.
So the only person recording and broadcasting the confrontation with Llewellyn was Llewellyn himself. When his body had arrived at the coroner’s office, his smart phone was found in one of his pockets, the device set to a live-streaming app. The phone had recorded and broadcast audio, but not video. The kid’s taunts were all recorded, but there was no evidence of the punch he had thrown. His cursing and taunting rant made it sound as if he had provoked Rick until his patience snapped and he slugged Llewellyn. And as the entire incident unfolded, it was shared over and over again on social media.
Seemingly from one moment to the next, the L.A.P.D. did feel the full clout of the Barclay family. The chief of police was notified that the governor himself was interested in a very thorough Internal Affairs investigation, and proving as quickly as possible that the Los Angeles Police Department did not protect rogue, brutal cops.
Then, while Rick was on a paid leave during an I.A. probe, he had his run-in with talent agent Wilt Kamen and a gang of bank robbers in Sherman Oaks. Although suddenly finding himself hailed as a hero, the L.A.P.D. and the district attorney’s office urged him to resign with a full pension and benefits in return for them not attempting to prosecute him.
Rick took the deal, and just a little over a year later his television career was under way, thanks to Wilt Kamen. “The producers of this new reality series CBS is interested in, Hollywood Justice,” Wilt had told Rick, “see this whole Llewellyn Barclay situation differently than the bureaucrats at the L.A.P.D. And guess what? So do many other people out there. People with TV sets. People who think this spoiled little affluenza kid got exactly what he deserved. That perverted little creep was trying to live-stream his rape of that girl. What a piece of garbage! Many people out there believe that. And they believe that you got unfairly punished.”
And for a while, Wilt Kamen was right. Hollywood Justice hit the air and Rick was introducing weekly recreations of crimes among the rich and beautiful of Southern California. Not only were the ratings solid to start with, but steadily increasing from week to week. Almost immediately there were talks about spin offs, more Justice shows set in exciting, glamorous places. Hawaii Justice, Miami Justice, and New York Justice were all fast-tracked for development.
And then another cop was accused of taking the law into his own hands.
After a Seattle homicide detective was exposed fabricating evidence against a college football player who had been accused of beating and choking a coed into a coma, the Barclay family resumed its crusade against “rogue police officers acting like judge, jury, and executioner when they happen to run across people they don’t like.” At the core of a “widespread crisis of police corruption,” they argued on every cable news program, radio talk show, and social media platform, was popular culture that kept glamorizing vigilante behavior. The worst such program was Hollywood Justice, “hosted by a murderer
like Rick Ballantine.”
As the barrage of attacks went on for weeks, then months, then more months—the Barclays drawing the support of various anti-police-brutality activists—Hollywood Justice’s ratings started to soften. Although the show was still not suffering the kind of dismal viewership that usually got a program cancelled, CBS decided it had enough of the controversy and fired Rick.
But Wilt already had his next move figured out. Getting Rick involved in a paranormal reality series like Confirmation was sure to keep him away from any more controversies, Wilt reasoned.
Rick glanced at Cornelia now for a moment before looking off into the distance with a bittersweet smile. “Hey, as Doc Knight would say, getting a smash hit TV series—or whatever all of this is going to lead to—beats the hell out of getting cancer any day.”
Sure, it was clever, Cornelia mused, and exactly the sort of leathery, put-upon macho humor Knight would use, but there was something weighty they needed to address right now. “Rick?”
“Yeah?” he said, and sipped his coffee.
“Our guess is as good as another, right?”
Rick turned back to her, a sober, piercing stare beaming out of his eyes. “So what do I think about where all of this is going? I don’t know. But…something big, obviously.”
“Our world as we know it might be ending right now.”
Rick raised a skeptical eyebrow, just as Cornelia guessed he would. “Ending? Well, that’s a little drastic, don’t you think?”
“No. I mean that life, the world—you know, reality…everything we thought we knew about how things work—well, it’s all going to be turning on its head.”
“It’s turned on its head already.”
“Yeah, with Pike getting beaten up. People like this Canyon guy. Where do you think all this is taking…us?”
Rick didn’t reply. He just gave a slight, cautious shake of his head and stared off into the distance. Then, at length, he gave her a weary grin and fished a folded-up piece of paper from his shirt pocket. He shook it open with one hand while sipping his coffee. As the paper flapped open, Cornelia recognized it as a copy of the email she, too, had been sent by Garret Robinson. It was an invitation and schedule outline for Sarah’s wake and funeral services.
“What?” she asked as she took the paper from him.
“If we want more opinions about what all of this is leading to, let’s keep talking to every point of view out there,” Rick said with an odd, sour expression on his face. “No matter how nutty they might sound.”
“What do you mean?”
“From what you told me about Sarah, she didn’t sound like any kind of evangelical.”
That was odd, Cornelia thought. “What do you mean? She wasn’t. Her religion went as far as putting up a Christmas tree.”
Rick pointed at the paper in her hand. “It says the services will be performed by the Reverend Nelson Prouty of the Reconstructionist Faith Chapel.”
So it did, Cornelia read on the paper. “I guess her father set all this up. Who are these people?”
“I’m sure they’ll have some colorful theories about the globes. So let’s try and keep the cameras handy.”
“Do you know this Revered Prouty?”
“No. But I know of his church.”
“From where?”
“From my ex-wife. Well, I guess my wife-at-the-time some years back. When she left me for a pastor in this group.”
8.
“RIOT AFTER FRENCH GLOBE APPEARANCE RAISES
NEW FEARS”
By: Dennis Clemmons, The New York Times
The French city of Marseilles witnessed the first acts of violence tied directly to the globe phenomenon sweeping the world.
One of the mystery globes appeared outside an apartment complex in the early morning hours of Saturday, September 8. Once local police forces arrived on the scene, gunfire erupted from the immense complex. Officers reported that snipers had fired on them as they examined the globe.
According to Jean-Pierre Faucheux of the Surete, the French national police, the snipers were members of an ISIS-affiliated terror cell that had been using the apartments as their headquarters.
“This group saw the arrival of the police,” Faucheux explained “and they must have assumed they were being raided.”
French authorities had been actively pursuing Kamal Aghmati, Issam Battuta, and Tarik Hamed, all three of whom were killed in the five-hour-long firefight.
Aghmati and Battuta were Moroccan nationals wanted for gun-smuggling and the attempted murder of a Toulouse police captain. Hamed, an Algerian, the police believe, was linked to the murder of Andre Bernheim, a Jewish doctor in Paris.
This incident, said Clotilde Pelletier, a reporter for Le Monde who has written extensively about terrorism and France’s large Muslim immigrant community, just puts the accent on what many see as a powder keg that will keep exploding in that country.
“France, much like the rest of Europe, despite the violence it has seen over the last several years,” Pelletier said, “keeps a very tolerant attitude toward the massive influx on African and Middle Eastern and Asian immigrants and refugees. But that, right or wrong, also raises fears of terrorism.”
As Paris police commissioner Claude Paget said very bluntly in an interview on the popular We’re on the Record show, “European countries need to realize some hard truths. Many of these immigrant communities often shield radical elements. Terrorist cells, gun and drug smugglers, and anarchists have easily infiltrated countries like France, the U.K., Germany, Belgium, and many East European nations. How many more massacres like the ones in Paris, in Brussels, in Manchester do we need suffer?”
Others, like Marseilles attorney Herbert Lachapelle, have aggressively objected to defining the Muslim immigrant issue as a terrorism issue. “Islam does not radicalize and it does not create terrorists,” Lachapelle wrote in his firm’s blog. “But racism, intolerance, and poverty do. Islam means peace. Rather than French society—or European society for that matter—growing outraged and paranoid about terrorism, it should be outraged by its discriminatory policies and attitudes toward immigrant communities. They should be outraged at the unemployment rate among young people, particularly young Muslims, and consider why so many in those communities are so angry.”
Lachapelle’s firm had defended numerous immigrants against terror charges.
A DANGEROUS CATALYST
“Although this shootout ignited another immigration and terror debate in Europe, the completely unprecedented nature of the globe phenomenon might be the catalyst for a much bigger threat,” said Dr. Edward L. Miller, a professor of psychology at Fordham University. “We are dealing with a yet unexplained event with these globes. It has baffled scientists all over the world. Since people fear anything they can’t understand, the vacuum of knowledge left by science will quickly be filled with all kinds of spiritual and fringe belief systems. It’s the fringe beliefs we must worry about.”
The immediate aftermath of the Marseilles incident illustrates Miller’s point. A statement posted on the web page of the Tunisian Kairouan Salafist Mosque, an Islamic fundamentalist group, claims that “It is obvious that these objects are the weapons of the devil and they are made to exterminate Islam, to perpetrate genocide against the Arab people. The world speaks of the first acts of violence as a result of these stones. These acts of violence are aimed at the word of Islam.”
Iranian cleric Razmara bin Hussein told three thousand followers in a sermon that “The signs of Satan appearing all across the world must be the final call for all Muslims to unite and prepare for the final holy war.”
Those who ignore the “obvious” threat of the globes, bin Hussein declared, are pledging themselves to the devil. All who side with the devil, bin Hussein added, must “suffer the punishment of the righteous.”
“This sor
t of rhetoric is very frightening, obviously,” says Dr. Martin Parkhurst, an International Affairs Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, “because the globe phenomenon has been embraced by so many people, particularly in Europe, as some sort of a positive sign. It’s a lot like the American New Age Movement…the way many in Europe see this. You have the theories that they’re signs from aliens or positive spiritual beings. So the point is that what do you have all of a sudden when you have one group of people seeing these things, these objects that science is at a complete loss to explain, as some kind of salvation and goodness, and another sees it as the work of the devil?”
Chapter 4
Dr. Gunderson’s Meltdown. Reunion.
Road Trip. Villagers With Pitchforks.
Chase.
1.
“That son of a bitch,” Rick Ballantine mumbled in the middle of the funeral service.
Almost immediately he felt Cornelia’s elbow in his side. But he couldn’t help it. The images on the small screen of his cell phone, the words in his ears from the ear-bud headphones, were just too frustrating.
When his gaze drifted to Cornelia, the look in her eyes was as sharp as her elbow.
“You’re not going to believe this,” he mouthed the words more than whispered them.
“…she would have wanted us to find our strength and to use grief for something positive,” the voice boomed from the gravesite. “Sarah would have wanted us to rise above our grief and fight the evil that is pulling all of us down.”
Rick nudged the volume on his phone higher and touched the triangular arrow on the screen. The YouTube video he had been watching continued to stream.
“I think it’s a set-up,” Dr. Marcus Gunderson spoke on the screen. “It’s part of some anti-science plot…some, some ploy to return this world to the dark ages.”
Confirmation Page 11
