Book 1 — The Telmar Conspiracy
Part 1 — The Iron Hand
Fact: In 1947, the USAF recovered wreckage outside of Roswell New Mexico.
Fact: In 1961, JFK announced that America would send a man to the moon.
Fact: 18 months later, he was shot and killed by an assassin.
Fact: In 1967, NASA landed a man on the moon.
Fact: In 1979, an American monitoring satellite, Vela Hotel, detected an unidentified double flash of light similar to a tropospheric thermonuclear detonation.
Fact: In 2003, a blackout caused over 50 million people in North America to lose power.
Fact: One month later, a blackout of exactly the same magnitude occurred in Italy.
Fact: The US government continues to deny any connection between these seven events.
— Taken from the dust jacket of, Shiva: Destroyer of Worlds, 1st ed. 2005 by Dr. Adrian Telmar
Chapter 1 — Knowledge
Knowledge is knowing that a tomato is a fruit. Wisdom is not putting it in a fruit salad.
— Attributed to Miles Kington, British Journalist
Adrian Telmar was a man whom the world refused to take seriously. He had published three books on the US government’s wanton and irresponsible exploitation of captured alien technology. After the second book, people stopped listening. From time to time, he was invited to speak on late night TV shows. However, he quickly discovered that his presence merely allowed the hosts of the shows to ridicule him more thoroughly than the editors of the scientific journals ever had.
At this moment, he was not concerned about alien weapons targeting innocent civilian centers. He had stumbled across something huge; a conspiracy which dwarfed the tangled web of Roswell, Vela, and the Apollo missions.
Adrian poked his head around the corner of the dining room shade. The residential street was empty. That was suspicious. In this neighborhood, the street was never empty, even at three in the morning. He mentally ticked off the information which he had on each of his neighbors for three blocks in every direction. Most of them had lived in this neighborhood longer than he had. Therefore, they could not be in on the plot to kill him. Unless the government had achieved functional mind control technology years ahead of schedule; and forced him to move into a neighborhood already filled with its stooges. He shook his head. That was paranoia, and regardless of everything else, he was not paranoid.
A police car turned down the road. Not good. The police were often the unwitting pawns of the schemers in high places. An anonymous tip, planted evidence, and you were on your way to the state pen; where you would die under mysterious circumstances, one more statistic to be used by those clamoring for prison reform.
He closed the shade and walked over to his computer. He opened the case and removed the hard-drive. He had already erased all of the files and rewritten every sector of the drive seven times. He now took the drive and put it in the toaster oven. It would bake there for 25 minutes; then he would shatter the platters.
He turned on the gas to his range, the smell of melting plastic beginning to fill the house. His phone rang. He waited, it rang again. He carefully walked over and picked it up. “Is this Adrian Telmar?” The voice sounded raspy and harsh.
Adrian pretended he had just woken up. “Who ith thith?” He slurred.
“Aardvark Collection Agency; it appears that the only time we can get a hold of you, is between the hours of two and three in the morning. Otherwise, you’re never home.” “I paid all my bills on time.”
“Not all of them... I will be stopping by at eight to collect.” The line went dead.
Adrian grabbed the hard-drive out of the toaster oven, leaving the phone hanging by its cord. He did not have much time. Melted plastic hissed and bubbled across the surface of the spatula as he removed the drive from the toaster oven. He dropped it on the floor, and smashed it with a meat tenderizer. All of the pertinent information was already downloaded to his iPod.
He was sure that he had recognized the voice. It was the same person who, at 7:00 AM, had left a message about the best vacuum cleaner that money could buy. The strike team was almost certainly en route. The call had been a simple obfuscation; a way of determining if he was in the house.
Adrian grabbed a small duffel. It contained grey jeans, various hues of polo shirts, and tan sneakers. It was an outfit which allowed him to disappear into a crowd; much like a grey pinstripe suit would have in the 1940s.
He threw the duffel into the back seat of his gray SUV. It was a car that he had carefully selected because it didn’t stand out in any way. He was a man who thrived on anonymity; except of course when he was courting the public favor, raising a rallying standard against the evil M.I.C.. The apparent contradiction of such actions was lost somewhere deep in the tortured pathways of his mind.
He backed the car out of the garage. He was a half block away before a single thought flashed through his mind. Did I turn off the gas? He shook his head and drove on. The car had not traveled more than a hundred feet before the night sky blossomed into a fiery orange glow. He looked back just as the shockwave hit his car. He was partially deafened, but could still hear the metallic thuds as burning chunks of shingle pelted the roof. His house was gone. The assassins had struck again.
I always like to start a story by setting the stage. To me this is important, because it establishes a certain... credibility with the listener. For example, if I started this story with alien spacecraft dropping from the sky like ripe apples, you would say, “Hold on Nick, You don’t honestly expect me to believe this do you?” On the other hand, if I start the story in my office, with my feet up on my desk, waiting for a client; you’ll be more inclined to believe whatever follows. So here goes...
It was a Friday. I remember that distinctly, because the loan sharks always sent their bruisers around on Fridays. One of those very same bruisers had just exited my office. He was the classic intimidating type; a physique like a gorilla squeezed into a three piece suit. However, it’s hard to be intimidating when the poor sap, whose fingers you’re supposed to break, has three handguns on the desk when you walk in.
The thug told me that if I didn’t pay Mr. Delaney, it was going to get real ugly. I spun the cylinder on the snub-nosed .38, just to make sure that it operated smoothly. He paled visibly, but made no move toward the bulge under his left arm. “Mr. Delaney is not happy Nick...” He paused, but I doubted it was for emphasis. His limited cranial capacity couldn’t hold more than a dozen words. “Not happy at all,” he finished, with as smug a look as his rattled brain could manage. I am pretty sure that Delaney (at a whopping three syllables) was the biggest word in his vocabulary. Now, the fact that his language skills would make a second grade teacher weep with shame, did me no good. His boss, Mr. Delaney, was in the right. I owed him twenty two thousand of the finest greenbacks Uncle Sam ever printed. I set the snub-nosed .38 on the desk and picked up my 1911. The thug began backing up. “Monday, Mr. Chase, you have until Monday.” He slammed the door and descended the stairs as gracefully as a dead elephant falling over a cliff.
I knew I was in trouble. It’s easy to intimidate hired goons. On the other hand, Irish gangster families are a lot more difficult to impress. I was worried that Mr. Delaney was not above putting the fear of God in the rest of his debtors by making an example out of one lonely private eye.
In case you didn’t already know, that’s what I am, a private eye. My office is at the top of a flight of rickety stairs; behind a beat-up pine door, which tends to stick in the summer. The frosted glass window, with its black lettering, tells a visitor everything he needs to know. “Nick Chase-Private Eye”
Over the years, a few of my clients have asked why it doesn’t say “Private Investigator” like every other office in the city. They are just poor saps who don’t understand that in my line of work, image is everything. It’s why there is an ashtray on my desk even though I didn’t smoke. People lump private eyes into two categories sleazy scuzzballs who ruin peoples’ lives with incriminating photographs, and hardboiled toughs who protect society by doing the things that the cops can’t or won’t do. I have made it my sole purpose in life to be identified as one of the latter crowd.
I ran my hand over the blued steel of my .45 before slipping it back into its shoulder holster. I really wanted to shoot something, I refrained. I already had enough trouble with the police. The last thing that I needed was to get my license revoked for discharging a firearm within the city limits. I tucked the gun back into its shoulder holster. What I needed was a client, a client with a job which would take me away from Chicago for a few days. What I did not need was the neurotic paranoid who walked through the office door five minutes after the gorilla vacated the premises.
Dr. Telmar had been living out of his suitcase for three weeks. He had four outstanding warrants, and a rental car which was missing its GPS. He had removed it and attached it to the bottom of a car in a Wal-Mart parking lot. The eight D-Cell batteries, which he used to power it, would probably be dead in another four days; at which point the rental company would begin looking for him. Fortunately, he had used a “borrowed” passport to obtain the car in the first place.
Even with all of these brilliant methods of covering his trail, he was still uneasy. There were too many people after him. He needed help. But where could he find it? The authorities wanted him, a paramilitary force had blown up his home, and most of his friends, all of whom he had met through the process of writing his books, were certifiable nut jobs.
There was only one solution... hire a private eye.