Confirmation

by Barna William Donovan

  “I don’t understand,” Jerry sputtered.

  “What’s that?” Knight asked.

  “Yeah, me neither,” Lacy spoke up this time.

  “This shutdown,” Jerry fumed. “Them shutting us out of this. Firing us! What the hell is this all about? Why now? They were going to talk to us. Give us access. Robinson was authorized to talk to us. What happened?”

  “Yes,” Cornelia couldn’t help adding. “That’s an excellent question.”

  “Some of the people in Washington seem to think your show’s too tabloid,” Knight said very calmly.

  Perhaps too calmly, Cornelia thought. She noticed Jerry clenching his fists.

  “My show?” Jerry replied. “So now you’re—”

  “And the car chase didn’t help things,” Knight continued. “But look—”

  “I thought you were going to explain that we saved lives,” Jerry snapped.

  “I tried. But, Jerry, would you just listen to me? Just calm down. All right? Just be cool. Now listen to me! What happened with your network contacts? Washington still wants to work with the media. They’re still talking transparency. They want to convince everyone that they’re not the problem. Especially now that we have protests outside of at least five military installations across the country. Including Travis. It’s getting nuts up here. So, once again, what’s going on with the TV deals you had in the works? Can’t any of your contacts pull strings? If you can tell me that we’ll be backed by a major network player, I can make a stronger case and they’ll let you guys join the press team.”

  Cornelia saw Rick shaking his head. “Yeah,” he said with a smirk on his face, “explain that we’re a better choice to cover this than Diane Sawyer.”

  Another plane coming in for a landing shrieked overhead.

  “No!” Cornelia thought it was wise to pull the Confirmation team’s strongest card from the deck. “We’re a better choice because we figured out how to tell where a globe will appear.”

  “Come again?” Knight’s startled voice came over the speakers.

  “You hear me?” Cornelia asked. “Tell them that! Tell them that we’ve got a breaking story. We can predict when and where a globe will appear. I’m not kidding here! That’s the truth!”

  5.

  “Does that help?” Cornelia asked as she lowered herself to the floor and leaned against the wall next to Melinda.

  Melinda had been squeezing and releasing, squeezing and releasing a Grip Master exercising mechanism for at least five minutes as far as Cornelia could tell. Maybe the exercises helped take the mind off the noise of the teaming masses circulating all around Terminal One of the airport at five in the morning. Maybe it helped ease the stress of frustration, the annoyance over being stuck in this holding pattern, camped out at San Francisco International with nowhere to go.

  Melinda grinned while she continued watching one of the TV sets suspended from the ceiling nearby. “To deal with the stress? Not really. Helps keep the wrist strong so I don’t injure it again lugging all of this stuff around…. Oh my God! Can you believe these people?”

  Cornelia followed her gaze to the TV. One of the CNN talk shows was in the middle of one of the myriad globe debates dominating all of television.

  “…It’s the guns! You want to start curbing all of the violence, you get rid of all the guns anywhere near any of these globes,” one of the guests, a woman wearing a blinding-bright lime-green jacket, argued vehemently while gesticulating with both hands. “Globes and guns don’t mix! Period! End of discussion!”

  A man wandering by and texting furiously on his phone nearly tripped over Cornelia’s feet.

  “Want to try it? Maybe it’ll work for you.” Melinda looked at Cornelia and offered her the hand exerciser. “Has everyone else been on a full walking tour of the airport again?”

  In fact, Matt was the only one slumped on the seats nearby at the moment. He was fast asleep, Cornelia could tell. Six other seats next to him were reserved by the video gear. To Jerry’s credit, just as he had predicted, the airport was now an immense waiting room. Teeming crowds of thousands had overrun San Francisco International, including the people attempting to catch booked flights, the frustrated, the depressed, the surly, the defeated waiting on delayed flights, and all the hopeless who just camped out and prayed for a standby seat and a cancellation. The Confirmation team, in contrast, was waiting for a true miracle. Not only were they waiting for Knight to get back to them about how they were suddenly in the good graces of the military, but with word that some kind of a special flight from Travis Air Force Base was on its way to pick them up.

  Cornelia took the hand-expander and started squeezing it as she glanced at CNN overhead. The hand gizmo was quite tough to work, and she knew she wouldn’t be able to keep it up for much longer than a minute. But, then again, she didn’t have Melinda’s thick, muscle-corded forearms either.

  “…Sure, disarm the people like we’re in some police state!” a man with the lean, wiry features of a long-distance runner, wearing a brown suit and a glaring orange tie, offered a rebuttal on screen. “We don’t know what’s going to happen next, what kinds of…things will make themselves known—things that put those globes all over the world, and we can’t even defend ourselves—”

  “Whatever put those globes will be immune to guns,” the woman in green cut in.

  “Excuse me, please, but let me finish—”

  “You’re not going to lead the world-wide resistance against the space invaders—”

  “May I finish?” the gun-rights advocate raised his voice.

  “One at a time, please,” the voice of a host from off-screen instructed.

  “Nobody knows what’s behind all this,” the gun advocate, now identified by a caption as Lane Perkins, said. “And people have a right to defend themselves. They have the right to peace of mind.”

  The woman in the lime-green suit, identified as Susannah Nash, replied with, “No one will have any peace of mind with trigger-happy crazies running around and taking shots at people!”

  “Well, I want to defend myself if any of Ms. Nash’s crazies threaten me and my family.”

  “And you’ll have nothing to worry about if sensible gun laws would finally take the weapons away from the crazies, Mr. Perkins.”

  “And you don’t think crazies and criminals will get guns even if you make them illegal? We’ve got plenty of cocaine and heroin addicts out there, and both those drugs are illegal. There’s this thing called the black market—”

  “Feel better?” Melinda asked as Cornelia struggled to complete another repetition with the grip-exerciser.

  Cornelia couldn’t help laughing. “Surprisingly…yes.”

  “Have at it,” Melinda said and chuckled, blowing an errant lock of hair from her eyes.

  “Wow! You do this enough and you can go back to competing again.”

  Melinda shook her head with an exasperated look. “If Confirmation goes nowhere—no air force help, no network deal—I might need to get my mind off things. Never could sit around and do nothing.”

  After resting her hand for a moment, Cornelia gave the strength device three more quick squeezes. The pump burned through her hand and up her forearm. “I know what you mean. This could be addicting. I should have gotten into bodybuilding after I lost my job in Florida.”

  “Sure,” Melinda said, and nodded enthusiastically. “I got into it after a knee injury in college. After I couldn’t swim anymore. Lost my scholarship.”

  “That stinks.”

  Melinda shrugged with a more intense sort of contemplative look in her eyes. “I always wanted to believe that if stuff doesn’t turn out right, you know, you can get stronger as a result.”

  Cornelia recalled Melinda’s exchange with Knight in New Jersey now. “So there’s a reason for….”

  Melinda returned a tight
, rueful chuckle. “Yeah, well, I’m not so sure about that anymore.” Her gaze panned across the chaotic mass of people circulating all around. “All of this….” She pointed her chin toward the TV set, where a graphic now filled the screen reading, “Up Next: The Globes. The Future. The Threat.” “I don’t know what kind of a purpose can be behind any of this.”

  Cornelia had no idea what the answer was either. She had absolutely no idea at all. “Despite the craziness we’ve seen…the fights, the Heiser shootout….”

  She could almost literally feel Melinda’s eyes on her, looking at her for an ever-elusive solution, guidance, a theory that tied up and explained everything elegantly.

  “Maybe,” Cornelia said, “we can still somehow change for the better as a result of this?”

  She hated the way her statement turned into a half-hearted, tentative question on the end.

  “I hope so,” Melinda replied, her voice stronger, more resolute.

  “So do we know anything to back up our bluff?” Rick’s voice suddenly called over the noise.

  Cornelia saw him weaving his way through the crowd, carrying a bag in one hand and a tray of coffee cups in another.

  “My hero!” she called, and rolled her eyes in mock elation. “When things are at their bleakest, Rick always comes through with what matters the most. Coffee!”

  “I do what I can, ladies,” he said, studying them on the floor. “Anything wrong with the chairs?”

  “Nothing much,” Melinda said. “If we hadn’t been sitting in them all night long.”

  “Shut up and hand over the coffee,” Cornelia said, and patted the floor next to her.

  “Sure, why not,” Rick said as he lowered himself to the carpet and leaned against the wall. “And how about a sugar rush to go with the caffeine?”

  And Cornelia noticed that the bag he was holding came from a donut shop. Except the inscription and picture on it looked odd. “I can’t believe it.”

  “Oh, believe it!” Rick said. “What good is a world-changing supernatural event if no one can cash in on it?”

  “You gotta be kidding,” Melinda said as Rick held up the bag.

  On its side, a cartoonish drawing depicted three people looking in astonishment at a mystery-globe-sized donut ball with a giant bite taken out of it. The enormous donut was supposed to be sitting on a pavement of some sort that was too weak to support its weight. Cracks and fissures were drawn extending in all directions from the bottom of the donut.

  “They’re mystery donut holes,” Rick said as Cornelia opened the bag and fished out one of the pastries.

  It looked to be coated in cinnamon and sugar. To approximate the appearance of granite, Cornelia guessed.

  “See, they all look alike on the outside,” Rick said, “but when you bite into them, they all have a different mystery filling.”

  Cornelia popped the one she held into her mouth, tasting a rich chocolate cream inside.

  “Jerry has the wrong idea about how to make money from these globes,” Melinda said. “Here, give me one.”

  “So, what’s going on?” Rick asked as Cornelia and Melinda helped themselves to more donut globes and coffee. “And do we have anything to make good on that bluff of yours?”

  “Nothing yet on the bluff front,” Cornelia said, and sipped some coffee. “Been looking at every globe story we can, but no one like David Kwan’s turned up anywhere.”

  Rick’s gaze drifted toward the TV. “Not even with all those experts analyzing this thing day and night?”

  “Nothing’s changed,” Cornelia told him. “One guess is as good as the other. Except now they’re getting crazier and crazier. And I didn’t think that would be possible.” Which made her think of the donut globe in her hand. Cashing in. “It’s pure ratings and theater now. So I supposed if the air force shuts us out, we can just go digging up all the crackpots we can.”

  “Some pundit,” Melinda said, tipping her coffee cup toward the TV, “argued that we should detonate nuclear bombs in the Pacific and the Atlantic at the same time.”

  Rick’s eyebrows shot up. “Are you serious?”

  “‘Fraid so,” Melinda said.

  “So we can show the globe-makers that we mean business,” Cornelia added.

  “I want to crack a joke right now,” Rick said, and shook his head. “Except I’m not sure I can. Let me get back to you, though.”

  “The speculation about them,” Melinda said, “you know, the origins and who put them all over the world and why. Well, it’s getting more and more colorful. Like there’s one about them being time-transported in from the future by Nazis hiding at the South Pole. Then one guy said it was all because of the gays—”

  “What?” Rick blurted out, and Cornelia thought he would drop his hot coffee in his lap. “Nazis brought the globes from the future because of the gays?”

  “No, those are two separate arguments,” Cornelia corrected. “One conspiracy theorist thinks it’s Nazis that brought the globes via time machine because…you know, they’re Nazis, and this is their weapon of global domination.”

  Melinda chuckled. “Get it? Global domination.”

  “Oh, God,” Rick groaned. “And someone else thinks this whole thing is because of gays?”

  “Well, naturally,” Melinda said. “It’s a punishment from up high.”

  “Why am I not surprised?”

  “Your ex-wife and her husband would be on that bandwagon, wouldn’t they?” Cornelia couldn’t resist asking, although she started regretting it almost as soon as it came out. She hadn’t intended to hurt him by dredging up bad feelings. But given that exchange at the cemetery she had overheard, perhaps all the bad feelings were still on the surface.

  Rick sipped his coffee, then allowed a half smirk as he said, “They probably are.”

  “On that note,” Melinda said, and took another mystery donut from the bag, “did you ever find out the deal behind how come they were at that funeral?”

  That, Cornelia thought, was a good question. She and Rick had, after all, been wondering about it before the Heiser incident spun everything off into the land of total chaos.

  “It’s Sarah Robinson’s brother,” Rick said. “Apparently he’s been converted into the Reconstructionist way of seeing things.”

  That was a surprise, Cornelia thought. “Wow! I didn’t see that one coming. Now I wonder who else in the family’s in the fold.”

  “Not their father,” Melinda said after biting the donut in half and studying its red cream filling.

  “From what we saw at the hospital, definitely not Garret,” Cornelia added.

  “Except there’s something about the Reconstructionists,” Rick said, and paused.

  Cornelia took note of the caution in his voice. “What’s that?”

  “They’re big fans of the armed forces. Very big fans.”

  “That’s just what we need,” Cornelia couldn’t help thinking out loud. Almost immediately she noticed the sideways glance coming from Melinda. “People who think this is the work of demons—because of gays, mind you—palling around with people who control the nuclear arsenal.”

  Rick quickly cocked an eyebrow. “No need to get panicky just yet. The air force doesn’t decide what’s done with nuclear weapons. Civilians in Washington do.”

  “Yeah, well,” Melinda said with somewhat portentous tones, “you know what I said about this making us stronger?”

  Cornelia looked at her. “Yeah?”

  “Forget it!”

  “Forget what?” Jerry’s characteristically edgy, high-strung voice startled them.

  “What is it, Jerry?” Cornelia asked.

  “Want a cup of coffee, boss?” Rick said with what must have been his most laconic tone, Cornelia guessed. But he had brought four cups of coffee on that tray. “It’s still nice and hot.”

 
“Keep the coffee,” Jerry snapped. “I’ll have some at Travis.”

  “Say what?” Rick asked.

  “Got a call from Knight. They’re giving us a chance. There’s already a plane on the tarmac.”

  6.

  Although the Gulfstream V jet that had been sent to pick the Confirmation group up from San Francisco had just reached its cruising altitude, Cornelia knew it was only a matter of minutes before it would start its descent into Travis Air Force Base. The short flight time was a problem, and the entire team knew it. So she, along with Rick and Lacy, crowded around Ian as he kept furiously perusing his iPad in one of the seats near the back of the plane. Glancing over her shoulder, Cornelia was glad to see Jerry distracting the two air force men at the front of the plane while Melinda, Tony, and Matt worked their video and audio equipment in between the two groups.

  “So what’s going on?” Cornelia asked Ian as quietly as possible.

  Carrying on a private conversation in a small aircraft like this, its class most often used as a private toy for corporate titans or millionaire celebrities, was not easy. The interior of the Gulfstream was, Cornelia guessed, perhaps as large as a spacious drainage pipe.

  “Can we tell the air force brass anything true?” Rick added. “Or are we getting booted out of Travis the moment we land?”

  Ian nodded. “I think we have a good chance of staying.”

  “What did you find?” Cornelia asked quietly.

  Ian glanced toward the front of the plane first. “References to vibrations and hums,” he said at length. “Feelings. In some of the stories about the people who found globes. Not in all of them, though. Remember that woman in the bookstore back at Mount Shasta? The one talking about the globes being made by earth spirits? Lois Mackenzine? She said she felt a vibration of positivity. In Italy, in that town where they blew up the globe, one of the people also talked about feeling a vibration of energy. It looks like the reporters missed what was right in front of them. Thought they were talking to a lot of touchy-feely new age yo-yos.”