Fallen Masters (3 page)

“Yes, sir,” Charley replied, limping out of the room on his prosthetic leg.

Jackson stared at the footage of the devastation that rocked Turkey and knew that the American response would have to be swift and massive. After watching several hours of nonstop news reporting from the devastated nation of Turkey, Jackson was brought out of the hypnotism that was the news cycle by Win Jackson, the President’s lovely wife, who reminded POTUS that she had purchased a pay-per-view for a current Charlene St. John concert as she was one of St. John’s many devoted fans.

“As horrible as it is, the devastation in Turkey will still be there after the concert,” Win said. “You spend so much of your time worrying about the problems of the whole world, it seems. Could we not have a little beauty in our lives?”

“Of course we can,” POTUS said, smiling gently and switching channels.

Charlene St. John was dazzling in a sequined, body-hugging dress that caught the spots and winked back in thousands of tiny flashes of light. She began the concert with
Ave Maria,
then
Panis Angelicus.
After that she covered some songs, then sang a few of her own. Every song was met with a thunderous ovation.

Then the lights changed and she stood alone in a single blue spot, surrounded by darkness. The darkness was filled by a few bars of music.

“Oh,” Win said, leaning forward expectantly. “Listen, this is her signature song. Isn’t it beautiful?”

Do you see the light

Of all creation: the day, the night?

A universe of peace and love

Of goodness that comes down from above

Take his hand

And you will understand

That we are one

We are one

We are one

After the concert was over, POTUS called his aide into the office. “Charley, would you try to get Miss St. John on the telephone for me?” POTUS said.

After a number of minutes, Charley handed POTUS the receiver. “I have her for you, Mr. President,” he said.

“Thank you,” POTUS said. “Charlene?”

“Hello?” Charlene replied in a tentative voice.

“Charlene,” the president said. “I hope you don’t mind my using your first name, but tonight, you put yourself on a first-name basis with the entire world. I would like to invite you to the White House. I want to personally thank you for all you have done. I don’t know if you fully understand this, Charlene, but your singing has awakened angels all over the world. Your one voice has made a difference. Will you come?”

“I—I would be honored, Mr. President,” Charlene replied. She felt frozen, and all her natural shyness bubbled up inside, rendering her close to speechless at this moment.

“The honor is mine. My family would love to meet you, too. My wife, Win, is always commenting how much she loves your songs. And my son, Marcus Jr., has a little crush on you, I think. He’s fifteen and at that awkward age, you know.”

“Oh, I know all about awkward, Mr. President.”

POTUS laughed. “See, that’s why I want you to visit us. You’re down to earth for such a big celebrity.”

“Well, I can now say the same of you, sir.”

POTUS hung up the phone and thought how such beauty could coexist with such sadness in the world. And how one voice singing in the darkness had a way of lighting the way. He hoped that this thought would sustain him as he dealt with the crisis in Turkey.

CHAPTER

4

Johnson Space Center, Houston

Dr. Jason Chang, a trim, middle-aged Asian-American, had been a space shuttle astronaut in the late 1990s and early 2000s, having logged more than sixty days in space. He had gained fame during one spacewalk when, as he and a fellow NASA astronaut had been repairing the shuttle’s exterior, a freak accident occurred. A piece of space junk severed the other man’s all-important EVA line and he had risked his own life to save his colleague.

No longer an astronaut, Chang was now one of the premier astrophysicists, not only in NASA but in the entire world. He was the “go to guy” for any anomaly, from errant asteroids to black holes, from star nurseries to black matter.

Dr. Chang put double cream and double sugar in his coffee as he looked at galaxy cluster Abell 2744, nicknamed Pandora’s Cluster. The presentation pieced together the cluster’s complex and violent history using telescopes in space and on the ground, including the Hubble Space Telescope, the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope, the Japanese Subaru telescope, and NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory. The slides were time sequenced with one second representing twenty-four hours.

“Whoa,” Chang said. He moved the presentation back by two months, then reviewed it again, this time taking as long as thirty seconds with each frame. After that, he did a quick calculation.

“Craig,” he said. “What is the redshift of Pandora’s Cluster?”

Dr. Craig Walcott laughed. “What are you doing, Jason? Testing me? It is
z
equal to 0.308.”

“Uh-uh,” Chang said. “Take a look at this.”

Craig looked at the figures, then at the screen, then at the figures again. “Wait a minute,” he said, “0.512? This can’t be right.”

“Run them yourself.”

“No, I wouldn’t question you. I mean you are the—” Dr. Walcott stopped in midsentence and reran the figures. “Damn,” he said. “I don’t understand this. Did we make a mistake with the first calculations?”

Chang moved to another computer, tapped in a few keys, then brought up the initial photos of Pandora’s Cluster. He ran the figures on that. “
Z
equals 0.308,” he said.

“Abell 2744 has not almost doubled its distance from us in twenty years. That’s impossible,” Craig said.

“What time is it in Moscow?”

Craig looked up at the array of clocks on the wall. “Sixteen thirty,” he said. “You’re going to call Dr. Kolnikov?”

“Yes. I have a theory about this, but I want to run it by him first.”

Chang initiated the call, then after a moment said, “Dmitri?”

“Jason, my friend, it is good to hear from you. How is young John? Are you still raising him to be a cosmonaut?”

“Astronaut,” Dr. Chang said. “We raise astronauts in America.”

“Ah, indeed.”

“Dmitri, I want you to do me a favor. I want you to take a look at Abell 2744 and give me the redshift.”

“
Z
equals 0.308.”

“Is that your calculation from the latest photos?”

“Why do you ask?”

“Please, just take a look at the latest photos and do a new calculation. I’ll wait.”

“Very well,” Kolnikov said.

While he waited, Chang took a swallow of his coffee, then made a face. “It’s grown cold,” he said.

“I’ll get you another cup,” Craig offered.

“You know how I like it?”

“Yes, you like a little coffee with your cream and sugar.”

As Chang held the phone, Walcott poured a new cup of coffee for him from a pot on a side table, doctored it appropriately, then brought it back. Chang took a swallow before Kolnikov’s voice came back on the phone.

“This is not possible,” Kolnikov said.

“What did you come up with?”

“
Z
equal to 0.512. But how can this be?”

“Examine the slides very carefully,” Chang said. “I think there are only two possible solutions. Dark energy is increasing at the rate of expansion beyond anything we have experienced so far, or there is a gathering cloud of dark matter that has suddenly entered our galaxy.”

“This will require more study,” Kolnikov said. “We will work together on this.”

“Thank you, my friend,” Chang said as he hung up.

“Jason,” Dr. Craig Walcott asked with concern in his voice. “If what we have here is an expanding cloud of dark matter, and if it would move into our galaxy, our universe, or impact with Earth, that could be—”

“A terminal event,” Chang said.

CHAPTER

5

Grenada

Patricia Rose Greenidge fell into her favorite easy chair in her modest living room with the heaviness of the entire world’s cares pulling her down with the force of iron weights. Known as “Mother Earth” or Mama Greenidge, or simply as “Mama G,” the elderly native of Grenada closed her eyes and tried to block out the visions that had disturbed her of late—more than ever before.

The nighttime sky above had revealed strange new patterns that she could see with her naked eyes, breaking from the expected movements upon which she and others based their charts—and had done so for thousands of years. It seemed as if she could actually see the planetary bodies moving of their own volition. Never had she experienced such phenomena, and she was at a loss as to how to interpret such signs.

“As above, so below,” she had often said regarding her knowledge of astrology and the insights that the stars and planets offered to human beings. If only they would observe, watch, and listen to the messages that, she believed, God was sending them in the movements of heavenly bodies. In her latest visions she saw a dark cloud coming to obscure the light of the sun, and knew full well that it was no eclipse. What else could it be? What were the heavens holding for Earth’s future?

She knew what it meant—even though she tried, pleaded, bargained with God for it to be some misinterpretation on her part. And if this meant what she thought it meant, should she share this? Was she blessed or cursed with this knowledge?

Mama G was not some quaint old black woman in a bamboo, palm frond, and flattened beer can shack, talking about ancestors’ island juju, reading chicken bones, and casting spells for the native islanders. She was much more sophisticated than that, and had developed a following of millions of souls the world over who listened to her nightly radio and Internet broadcasts and read her blogs and books. She was a media phenomenon whose audience had grown exponentially over the past fifteen years, since near the turn of the millennium, when her astrological readings and teachings had captured the attention of more and more people around the globe.

Although she was not educated beyond high school level, Mama G had studied the ancient wisdom and esoteric teachings of the stars on her own, and no one understood or taught astrology the way she did, with her island intuition and unique insights into traditional ways of matching the power and position of the stars with human life.

As an astrologer with psychic powers, she wrestled with the conflicts that sometimes arose between her access to knowledge of the metaphysical nature of the world and her deep faith in a loving God who had created the universe, of which she knew in her heart she was but a minute part.

Patricia Rose Greenidge did not believe in predestination, the belief that all events throughout eternity have been preordained by divine decree, including each individual’s ultimate destiny. No, she could not go there. She thought, instead, how sad it was for those who believed that their own lives were plotted out in their entirety—either by an astrological chart or a divine plan that could not be altered.

If that were the case, how could one learn anything from life? Why would you try to improve yourself, help others, or strive to do better? The answer is, you wouldn’t. In the predestination scenario, you would simply accept that your lot in life was set in stone based on God’s unchanging will—period. End of story.

Instead, Mama G believed—and preached constantly—that human beings decide what it is their souls need to learn and experience before they incarnate on the Earth plane. She saw her role—that is, how she employed her God-given gifts—as that of a guide for others on their earthly journeys, which often put her in direct conflict with some of her more conservative family members and neighbors. The world embraced her, but her own island sometimes judged her harshly, and even ostracized her.

But Mama G persevered, knowing deep in her heart, in the very core of her being, she had a purpose, and that purpose revealed itself each day as she sought to help others.

She could not, and would not, attempt to force her own vision on any individual who sought her guidance. She understood that her purpose was to help people unlock their own free will and inner resources to cope with life and to find their own way to the Source. She often urged her listeners to, “Live passionately in the days that have been given to you. Be of help to others in your life as an instrument of the Universe. Do good at every opportunity—and do nothing rather than something that would harm another person.”

But what good were such noble intentions in the face of the momentous catastrophe that Mama G foresaw as a coming storm on the horizon of time?

Mama G had studied where the Earth had been and where it was going. Now, as the Earth and its people entered into the new Age of Aquarius, a twenty-six-thousand-year cycle was coming—some would say colliding—to an end. The Earth neared an alignment with the stars in relation to the sun, which would rise on the winter solstice at the very center of the galaxy in a short time. In metaphysical and astrological terms, the people faced the end of days, and Patricia Rose Greenidge could not see beyond that point to a future for mankind.

She was aware, too, of the end of the Mayan calendar that charted the very same epochal cycles she was appreciating with profound questioning, now, of what she must do.

O Lord,
she prayed in silence,
show us the way to understand the true knowledge of our existence in whatever time is left to us.

Mama G knew that the world was facing a chance for change. But if the people did not grasp it and make the necessary changes, the chance would be lost forever. She knew, too, that she was being deliberately blocked by some unknown force: Her abilities, once so free-flowing, were being limited or harnessed in some way.

It was as if the gathering clouds of darkness sought to muddy her thoughts, muffle her words, and stall her actions by shifting the energies around and within her in ways contrary to what she had known for her entire life. Something was different this time, and she wasn’t certain exactly how or why.
And I don’t know what I can do about these dark energies,
she thought grimly.