The parousia effect

Chapter 7

The waitress came over with the plates of food, and Joseph began to eat animatedly. So did David and Hansen. When they were about to finish, they didn’t notice the four men who had entered the cafeteria. Two stayed next to the entrance door, and two approached them. When he felt them next to him, it was when Dr. Hansen noticed them and looked up. One of them was smiling at him; he looked in his fifties, with long hair up to his shoulders, and a thick mustache. The other one was a little behind and didn’t smile. He wore his hair shorter and with an incipient beard and mustache. Hansen recognized the man who was smiling at him, and paled immediately.

“I see you remember me, dear friend,” the man said, still smiling. David was sitting in front of Joseph and Hansen, and the man pushed him a little towards the window, making room and sitting next to him. He looked at Joseph carefully.

“Cute!” He said, then looked back at Hansen. “We are still very hurt by what you did to us, especially Karen, who has not stopped crying for a single day for her son.”

The latter was said stopping smiling.

“Look, Tommy,” Hansen said, hesitating a little, “the boy doesn’t know anything about all this. We could discuss this quietly and elsewhere.”

“Unless you had come to bring us to the child, I don’t think we have anything to discuss. You came to do that, right?”

“Who is this guy?” David asked Dr. Hansen. The man turned to David and gave him a contemptuous look.

“And who are you?” He asked in turn. “You better stay out of this. The doctor here and I have issues to discuss.”

“He’s the leader of The Second Coming group,” Hansen said. “His name is Tommy Sanders. Look, Tommy, right now we must fix some issues, then we can discuss this. If you want we go to your home or headquarters of the group once I have done what I have to do. Okay?”

“Do you think I’m stupid, or what?” Tommy raised his voice; there was anger in his gaze. “Four years ago you made fun of us and you took the child! You knew he was ours and you took him, and now that he is back we won’t let him go from our hands again!”

“Listen, Tommy, a while ago two crazy groups, one of them called The Blessed Ones, tried to kill us, especially the boy. If you take him, they’ll find him and kill him, and kill you too. Our only chance to stay alive is to get him out of the country as soon as possible.”

Hansen saw Tommy’s face paled, but he didn’t flinch.

“Don’t think you’re going to fool us again, Hansen,” he said, then looked at the boy. “You and this moron can go wherever you want, we will take the child. We have big plans for him.”

Joseph clung to Hansen. He was scared. Tommy got up from the table and tried to grab Joseph, but he felt David’s left hand on his arm.

“I won’t let that happen,” he said. Tommy looked at David and chuckled.

“And how do you plan to prevent it? We are four, and unless the doctor has learned boxing or something, I don’t think you can with us.”

“So, you aren’t armed,” said David. “Even better.”

That said, he got up quickly, pulled Tommy to him and punched him right in the nose, throwing him against his companion, who almost fell backwards. The other two men at the entrance ran towards them and the first to reach, David hit him hard in the stomach, falling to his knees with a rictus of pain on his face. The second threw a punch but David dodged it, with his left hand he threw a hook to the liver and with the other right to the face. The guy fell on his back complaining of pain in his right side. The man who was with Tommy managed to surprise him from behind and hit him with his right fist in the lower back, where the kidneys are. David turned and faced him, the guy managed to throw another punch that hit him fully in the mouth and made him stagger, but then David managed to recover and with a kick in the groin he ended up with him. Tommy was recovering leaning against a table, and Hansen and Joseph watched everything from their seats. The rest of the few diners and cafeteria workers watched dumbfounded everything. David approached Tommy and grabbed him by the shirt flap, he was about to hit him again when Tommy raised his open hands.

“Wait! Wait! It is obvious that we aren’t fighting people.”

“And then why did you fight?” David asked.

“We had to try, right? We just want the child! It’s ours and he stole him!”

Dr. Hansen got up from his chair, with Joseph at his side.

“Who knows what kind of life you would have given him!” Hansen said. “That’s why I took him! Besides, he’s a child, not a God. Look! Scared by what is happening. Even some people tried to kill him today! I kept him hidden so as not to risk his life, but apparently wasn’t enough. How you found out where we were?”

Tommy laughed briefly.

“We have people where you least imagine, doctor. And if it’s true that they tried to kill him with more reason you must to give him us. We will protect him.”

Joseph clung more to Dr. Hansen.

“Why do they want to take me, Dad?” He asked with a trembling voice, about to cry. “I’m scared; I don’t want to be separated from you...”

Hansen held onto him more.

“Take it easy, son,” he said. “Nobody is going to take you away from me. No one.”

Dr. Hansen ran to the door with Joseph holding hands. David gave Tommy and followed him. The three men who accompanied Tommy were reincorporating slowly, still stunned. He claimed them not to make a greater effort to remove the child from Hansen, and ordered them to follow him, leaving also, as the waitress asked them who would pay the bill. Outside, as they walked to the car, Dr. Hansen saw from the other side of the street as another car stopped and four men descended from it, one of them Thomas, the dark visitor several hours at his friend’s house. David also saw them and told them to get into the car quickly, which they did. Tommy and his companions also saw the newcomers and paralyzed on the spot. Tommy knew well Thomas and knew what he was capable of. The Dodge Charger started violently and joined the traffic. The four men had taken their guns but didn’t give them time to shoot, so they returned to their car and also got underway.

“We have to lose them!” Hansen shouted at David, who was going to the wheel. “We must arrive at the airport to leave the country!”

David took the next avenue on his right and tried again to reach the Williamsburg Bridge to take the highway to the John F. Kennedy airport. Fortunately traffic at that time of the morning was fluid and managed to reach the bridge without major setback. David watched in the rearview mirror how the vehicle was getting closer to them and he stepped on the accelerator, feeling the power of the Charger engine. He passed three more cars and left the bridge without noticing which route they were taking. A few minutes later they found the highway and the road to the airport. David accelerated more. The rearview mirror on his door disappeared violently. They were shooting. The rear windshield cracked, letting a bullet pass and also exploding into pieces the rearview mirror in front of David. Fortunately no piece of glass hit him in the face. Dr. Hansen was shouting at Joseph to stay down in the seat and he began to sob, frightened. David had already thought about he was going to do.

“Hold on tight!” He told them, turned to look back and a bullet whistled close to his face, piercing the windshield. He saw that the car in the rear approached a little more and stepped on the brake; the Charger blocked the four wheels leaving a trail of burned tire smoke and pavement markings. The driver of the other vehicle did not have time to react and violently struck the Charger from behind; the strong impact caused the airbags of the steering wheel and dashboard will be activated, taking visibility away from the driver and causing him to brake violently and get off the highway on the right. The car skidded on the ground out of control and finally stopped in the opposite direction to the channel where they came from. Inside, Thomas, the driver and his two companions in the backseat were stunned. However, Thomas managed to remove the air bag and leave the car within a few seconds. When he scanned the highway looking for the Charger, it had already disappeared from his sight.

After the incident with the concrete truck, Mark and Doris went back to the scientist’s house and looked for more neighbors who had witnessed the incident. An old woman told them that she had heard the gunshots and immediately looked out a window, and a few seconds later saw two men and a boy left the scientist’s house and boarded a car, leaving the scene in a hurried way.

“Did you see what those men and the boy were like?” Doris asked her. “Were they white? Colored?”

“They were all white,” the old woman said. “One of the men was younger than the other, and the boy was small, about four or five years old.”

“You’re a good observer, and you also have a good memory,” Mark said. “Anything else you remember?”

The old woman made a gesture of annoyance, it seemed that the words of that detective rather than praise, offended her.

“I’m an old woman, detective, but I don’t have Alzheimer’s yet. One of the advantages of reading a lot and solving crossword puzzles is that you exercise the brain, preventing it from getting numb. That’s why I remember many things.”

“That’s very good, Mrs. Hill,” Doris said. “Anything else you’ve seen? Do you remember what car it was?”

“I don’t know much about cars, but I'm sure it was the couple’s car that lives in that house where the shooting happened. I had always seen them go out on it. It’s a large four-door and silver color car. I apologize if I never noticed tuition, but I'm not aware of those things. I hope they haven’t stolen it.

“Don’t worry, Mrs. Hill,” Mark said. “You’ve provided important and valuable information. Thank you.”

That said they left the porch of the old woman’s house, heading towards their car.

“Do you believe in what she told us?” Doris asked. “She doesn’t seem to be senile or anything like that.”

“She doesn’t need to invent anything. If I heard a gunfight, I would also look out through my window, despite the risk.”

They reached his car and Mark opened the pilot’s door. Doris opened the other.

“We’re leaving now?” Doris asked. “Don’t we have to look for more witnesses?”

They got into the car and Mark sat behind the wheel, started the engine and started it up.

“Let’s see what the scientist and his wife have to tell us,” he said.

 In the New York City Police Department, Dr. John Moses and his wife Margaret were preparing to go to a hotel, when Mark and Doris arrived. Captain Mulligan went out to meet them, they informed him of the old woman’s data he accompanied them to the interrogation room where the scientist and his wife were. Mark was straight to the point.

“Who were the two men and the boy who fled in your car?”

Dr. Moses looked unperturbed.

“Friends who spent the night with us,” John said. “They have nothing to do with what happened. We told them to leave because we didn’t want to risk the child anymore.”

Mark sat in front of him, at the other side of the table. Doris stood by his side, studying the reaction and expressions of marriage to each question of her partner.

“Then, you can tell us who they were,” Mark insisted. “They can support your story. They are witnesses to a crime scene.”

“And it’s not good that they left without waiting for the authorities,” Doris seconded, “and you didn’t mention them in your statement.”

“My husband already told you,” Margaret replied, “that we didn’t want to risk the child any more. It was a very violent scene what that poor creature witnessed. We were protecting him.”

John took his wife's hand on the table.

“They’re friends of our deceased son Robert,” John said. “The boy served with him in the Marine Corps in Afghanistan and had brought us a letter from our son Robert in case he didn’t return home. The other man was his father and the boy his brother. They told me their names but I don’t remember it, it was the first time I saw them.”

Margaret looked at her husband, expectantly. She didn’t know about the letter, and John realized he hadn’t had time to tell her.

“Yes, a letter, my dear,” he said, somewhat excited. “I hadn’t had time to tell you. Here I have it.”

He took the paper from his pants pocket and handed it to her. Margaret opened it, beginning to read it with trembling hands. Realizing that it was an intimate and painful moment for the couple, Mark got up from his chair and motioned to Doris to follow him, leaving the room. Outside they met with Captain Mulligan, who had watched what happened through the mirror-window.

“Let’s believe them, for now,” Mulligan said. “Let them go. Check if there are security cameras around the house that have captured the moment when these three persons left, to see their faces. Let me know what you find.”

Mark and Doris nodded. A little later they were sitting at their desks, Mark watching the images and traffic from the security cameras, and Doris checking the database to find out the identities of the deaths both in the scientist’s house and the patrolman. Mark said he found a traffic camera one block from the crime scene, he typed some data on his computer and a video appeared on the screen. The camera was located on a lamppost and showed to the right of the image the house of Dr. Moses and its surroundings; it were clearly visible several vehicles parked in front of the houses, all of two floors and very similar appearance paired with each other. In the center he could see the scarcely traveled street because it was very early in the morning, and on the left side of the screen there was another group of two-floor houses. Mark forward the video until the time of the event and then saw two men approaching quickly with weapons in their hands, they look out the window of the scientist’s house and start shooting inwards, stopping doing it within a few seconds. One of them kicked and opened the front door and enters, the second man also enters. Several minutes passed and then Mark sees how two men and a boy leave the house in a hurry and get into a silver-plated car parked in front of it. The car starts and for Mark’s fortune the car escape route was just in front of the traffic camera, so he could see the faces of the driver and copilot. He froze the image and immediately opened the facial recognition program, starting with the driver. It would take several minutes to find a match. He stared at the two persons for a moment and seemed to recognize the copilot, but didn’t know where and when he saw him.

Doris, meanwhile, printed the photographs of the dead of the house and the patrol car and went to look for it at the printer. She went to the billboard near her desk and pasted the pictures on it. She took a marker and wrote down the names under each one. Having done that, she was thoughtful looking at the photographs with her arms crossed. Mark looked at her, amused.

“What do you think?” He asked.

She was still thoughtful.

“It’s weird,” she said at last. “All of them somehow belonged to a religious group or a sect.”

Mark shrugged.

“The three dead in the kitchen belonged to a well-known satanic sect located at the center of the city that once was denounced by several people for making scandalous animal sacrifices,” Doris continued, and pointing to the first three: “they were part of a collective arrest was done in a surprise operation. The other three belonged to a well-known religious brotherhood that although it doesn’t make animal sacrifices, they are still characterized by fanaticism and violence with which they attack all those who consider "infidels" or who are against the doctrine of God. Something similar to Al Qaeda or Isis, but haven’t yet reached the terrorist attacks to assert their point of view.”

Mark got up from his chair, interested.

“So, our friends here weren’t just thieves,” he said.

“Exactly! And what appeared to be a robbery, neither was.”

“And then what were they doing at our scientist’s house?”

Mark returned to his desk and the facial recognition program had already completed the search: in records there was no information about the person who was driving the vehicle, so they did not have a name either. Immediately began the facial recognition of the person who was copilot. To his surprise, the program found a match, and immediately displayed a file with a photo and information related to the person.

“Of course!” He exclaimed. “He’s our missing. The scientist who became famous for having successfully cloned organs.”

Doris approached to his desk. She also recognized the face of Dr. Hansen.

“Julius Hansen,” she said. “I remember the fuss that he put together when he managed to clone a human organ and make it work well. A few months later he had mysteriously disappeared without a trace.”

“Yes, I remember the case now. We never knew what happened to him. I remember that the investigation about his whereabouts stagnated and we had to leave the case open in case new information appeared. And here we have one!”

“Yes. Mulligan will be ‘very happy’ to reopen the case. The Mayor screwed him up a lot when we couldn’t find his whereabouts.”

Doris sat at her desk again.

“I wonder who will tell him,” she smiled broadly, seeing him. Mark sighed with resignation.

“Don’t complain,” Doris told him. “You know he appreciates you more than me.”

“Yes, of course. I’m surprised that in the whole day he didn’t order me to cut my hair.”

Mark looked again at Dr. Hansen’s file. He returned to the facial recognition program and again observed the "no matches" message in the case of the man who was driving the car. He remembered what Dr. Moses had said about him regarding their son.

“The scientist said they were friends with his deceased son, and that the youngest served in the military with him, didn’t he?”

Doris nodded. Mark opened the information database of the Secretary of Defense and wrote the name of Robert Moses, then the system showed him a detailed file on it, with all his trajectory in Special Forces and with a red phrase in the top of the screen that said "Killed in Action". He searched the registry of all the members of the regiment where he had served and the system showed him a list of at least the two hundred names. He would have to check one by one to find someone who looked like the man in the video and it would take a long time. He thought for a few seconds and then asked for the report of the day he died in combat; if his hunch was right, someone very close would have been with him willing to bring a farewell letter to his parents. The report said that only five people were with him at the time of his death, each with its own report of what happened. Better five than two hundred. He was requesting the reports of each one and the system showed him the report accompanied by a photo. The first three didn’t resemble the man in the video, but the fourth had an almost exact resemblance. He read the name: David Lee Cranston.

“I think I already identified Hansen’s companion,” he said. Doris got up from her seat again and went to his desk. She looked at the picture.

“It’s the same,” she said. “No doubt.”

“At least in this, Moses didn’t lie. What remains for us to find out what a former Marine does with our friend Hansen.”

“Maybe he was at that time visiting the Moses to give them his son’s letter, and seeing everything that happened he decided to intervene. Or maybe he’s defending our friend Hansen from someone else. We already know who stabbed one of the assailants, and with what.”

“Yes. A commando knife.”

Mark got up from his desk and headed to Captain Mulligan’s office, peeked out the door and he just gave him a look as he leafed through some documents.

“I have news, Captain.”

Mulligan look at him briefly again.

“I thought you'd cut your hair. Any report data about the killing this morning?”

“Actually, yes. A witness said that after the shooting, she saw two men and a boy leave the scientist’s house and flee in his car.”

“¿Did you check if there were cameras in the area as I ordered?”

“Yes, and in fact we recognized the two men. You will not believe who one of them is.”

Mulligan was interested. He put down the papers and looked at him.

“And who is he?”

“Our disappeared four years ago. Dr. Julius Hansen.”

Mulligan stood up from his chair.

“Are you sure?”

“Yes sir! A hundred percent sure.”

“And the other one?”

“A former Marine who served in Afghanistan with the son of Dr. Moses. We think he was the one who took one of the assailants out of circulation with a commando knife. Most likely, he was in the wrong place at the wrong time and stepped in to defend the Moses.”

“And then why would he run away if he acted in defense of the Moses? Why did he go with Hansen?”

Mark shrugged.

“That’s what we’re going to find out.” He said.

Mulligan put his hands on his desk, thinking. When Dr. Hansen disappeared without a trace, his superiors pressed him daily to advance in the investigation. Although he was in charge of the homicide unit, the Commissioner and the Mayor put him at the front of the search given his excellent profile and the tenacity he had shown in carrying out his work. The FBI wanted to get involved in case it was a k********g, and the National Security Agency also wanted to enter the game in case it was an act of terrorists, but they were relegated to the background because of the great confidence that had their superiors in Mulligan and because at no time there was a communication from any group demanding rescue for the scientist. The last activities of Dr. Hansen pointed out that was dedicated exclusively to the cloning of human organs, which may have caught the attention of some group of smuggling and organs trafficking, and therefore was kidn*pped to work for them in that regard. That’s why they thought there had been no rescue demands of any kind. When a year of his disappearance had passed, without results, the disappointment of both superiors became evident and then Mulligan felt that he already had his first blemish in his record spotless. His frustration became so evident to the point of wanting to resign, but it was his superiors who convinced him not to do so, ordering him to leave the case open if new data appeared in the future. But now that they had an important fact, he didn’t want to miss the opportunity to know why the doctor had disappeared, and more now that it involves a b****y event.

“Send the description of the car and Hansen and his companion, our former Marine, to all units and establish checkpoints on all highways, border crossings and all those places that can serve as a conducive means to Hansen disappears again such as airports, train and bus stations,” he ordered. “Pay special attention to faces: Hansen may be using a fake name. If he has something to do with what happened we'll find out. This time we cannot let him disappear again. He takes us some advantage but if we do things right, we’ll get to him and so he will explain what the hell is going on.”

Mark nodded and headed for the door, when he was about to leave, Mulligan called him:

“Good work,” he said. “Have the Moses left?”

Mark nodded.

“Look for them again and tell the doctor that we already know that Hansen was the one who was in his house and fled with his car. Let’s see if this time they tells us what the hell he was doing there after four years.”

Mark nodded and hurried out. A few minutes later he and Doris had already passed the description of Hansen, David and the car to the rest of the police force, and they informed them in return that checkpoints had been established at various locations. Then they went in search of the scientist and his wife.