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2 The Third Eye Coffee House

  My favorite place to hang out in Sedona is the Third Eye Coffee House, located just off the main drag in West Sedona. I’m not really into hanging out, per se, in public places where other people can tune in to your private conversations. I’m all for tuning in to their private conversations. As a former investigative reporter, snooping comes naturally to me.

  The Third Eye had a kind of New Agey orientation. The décor was definitely Late Woo-Woo, starting with the tasteful third eye sign outside the building. Inside you’d find a huge mural covering one wall depicting the cosmos, with a special magnified section emphasizing the Pleiades constellation. On other walls there were framed photos of orbs—those freakin’ orbs again!— taken by customers over the years; an acrylic painting of a psychedelic vortex; a framed photo of moonwalker astronaut Edwin Mitchell, he of the UFO advocacy; and a clay figure of the sitting Buddha with an iPod in his hand and headphones covering his ears.

  The place smelled richly of coffee, incense, stale flowers, sweat, and human methane gas. It had Wi-Fi with free Internet access, so a parade of Sedonans with nothing else to do sat around all day sipping their beverages and looking for soulmates, I suppose, on the Internet, or updating their Facebook pages. There were about a dozen small tables in the place, a comfortable couch, a large round oak table with six wooden chairs around it, a vase of plastic roses in the middle. The walls were painted a sort of plum color, apparently representing the purple hues of the sixth chakra, aka the third eye.

  A lot of my pals hung out at the Third Eye: it was a great place to catch up on the gossip of the day and spread a little of your own.

  The morning after the Oak Creek Canyon incident I cruised into the coffee house around ten a.m., expecting a couple of friends to be there and maybe a little buzz about The Event, if word had even filtered into the city yet. What I found was a packed house, about two dozen people excitedly chattering away. When I walked in, all eyes turned toward me.

  The place got very quiet. I walked over to the big round table, where I occasionally held court.

  John C. Hack, alias Hacker, my best friend and fellow mischief-maker, immediately thrust a newspaper under my nose.

  “Marty!” he nearly shouted. “Did you see this? Know anything about it?”

  The paper’s big banner headline on page one fairly screamed: “FOUR KILLED IN FIERY CANYON CRASH NEAR SEDONA.” And the subhead: “Canyon fire squelched by mysterious black helicopters.” There was a huge color photo of a badly burned car on its roof, surrounded by charred Ponderosa pine trees. Nearby, two motorcycles lay in a heap of twisted metal.

  “Golly, folks,” I said modestly, coyly, “I’m afraid there’s nothing I can tell you about this— this terrible accident!” I wasn’t lying.

  Around the table sat the usual members of my posse: Benny Bravo, my former editorial assistant at my Sedona Confidential website and the town’s only Jewish Mexican; “Past Life” Penelope, a local psychic and infamous gossipmonger; Claude “Picasso” Imperioli, starving artist and endless pontificator; and Dan Strange, a Jeep tour driver and obsessive government conspiracy theorist.

  “What exactly happened?” I asked innocently, flashing Hacker our secret signal—a quick movement upward of the eyes, signaling that something else entirely is going on—and he acknowledged the signal by tugging on his left ear twice.

  Penelope jumped in, talking fast. “Two foreign-make bikes went through the guardrail and over the side up by the overlook, just after the switchbacks,” she spurted, “quickly followed by a Mercedes. The car had diplomatic license plates, Marty, isn’t that a kick in the head? And there were four bodies, all burned beyond recognition. So nobody knows who these people were, or why they went over the side, or—and this is even weirder—how those black choppers happened to be there to put out the fire!”

  “How did the helicopters put out the fire?” I asked, because I had no idea and wanted to know.

  “Says here they just happened to be in the area,” said Dan Strange, a huge hulk of a man, gentle as a lamb. “Doesn’t say they were military, but I figure they had to be. You know, black military choppers been buzzin’ Sedona for years, lookin’ for alien encampments and UFO evidence in the canyons. Anyway, they used these huge buckets to scoop up water from the creek and put out the fire in three or four trips. Cool, huh?”

  “Pretty amazing story,” I mused. “Something like this happening in our own back yard. Were there any, uh, witnesses?” I crossed my fingers behind my back.

  “Nope,” said Benny Bravo. “Choppers did their job, then left, and a few minutes later four fire trucks showed up to make sure the whole canyon didn’t go up in flames.”

  “Verrrrry interesting,” I said. “Why near Sedona, I wonder? What were those people doing here?—you know, the diplomatic plates.” I was fishing for info, hoping I wasn’t too obvious.

  Hacker leaned over and half-whispered, “Marty, I gotta talk to you, and soon. Can I drop over to your house maybe this a.m.?”

  “Maybe later,” I said quietly. “But let’s wait a while. Leela will be here in a few. She had to make some phone calls. She’s going to D.C. later this afternoon, you know, for a meeting with some bigwigs in the State Department.”

  “Hmmmm, right,” nodded Hacker. “Seems like she’s been spending a lot of time out of town lately. Something going on that I don’t know about?”

  “Hacker, I really don’t think that’s any of your—” I stopped in mid-sentence. The room had suddenly gone silent, as if all the air had been sucked out of it. I looked around, and froze.

  Three young women flounced into the Third Eye, giggling and laughing, their voices like ethereal music. They were impossibly cute, looking like clones of each other: blond hair tied up in ponytails, blue eyes flashing, miniskirts and tank tops, tattoos and piercings everywhere.

  “What the fu—” started Dan, then stopped.

  “Hi, folks!” said the three in unison, sounding strangely like the Dixie Chicks in close harmony. “Don’t let us stop the fun! We’re just here for our lattés,” chimed one of the three, as they headed for the coffee counter.

  “It’s the Dakinis,” whispered Penelope loudly. “The recruiters for that bitch Kali’s Tantric Temple.”

  “Recruiters?” asked a guy from the next table who had been eavesdropping on our conversation. I had never seen him before. “For a tantric temple? Where is this place?”

  The psychic looked the dude up and down, dismissed him with a sneer, and turned back to our little clique. “Recruiters, right. These little hotties recruit people for Goddess Kali. But be careful. People say they have some kind of mystical sex power. They say if one of them even touches you, you are hooked on her forever and you become some kind of sex slave.”

  “That’s some kind of bullshit,” I said to the folks at our table. “In Tibetan Buddhism, Dakinis are like benign spirits. “I don’t think these hussies—”

  “Hold it right there, pardner,” said Dan Strange. “I have heard that there is some very weird shit going on at that woman’s spread out by the creek, that Goddess Kali. And I know there’s a lot of tourists coming to Sedona to see her.”

  The conversational level in the Third Eye returned to normal, although most of the patrons in the place kept a wary eye on the bubbly trio at the coffee bar. Suddenly the three walked to our table and stood directly in front of me.

  “Helloooooo, girls,” I said cautiously, “something I can do for you?” They looked about fourteen at first glance, high school cheerleader vibes, but up close they showed a little wear and tear. One of them stepped out and looked me right in the eye.

  “Marty Powers, right? Goddess Kali said we’d probably find you here. She wishes to send you her special personal invitation to visit our Tantra Temple.” I gulped, as the memories of my sorta sordid (and very brief) affair with “Goddess Kali,” the former psychic known as Aura, leaked o
bscenely from my memory bank.

  “I’d like you all to meet my sisters,” said my new friend, indicating the other two Dakinis, “Karma and Satori. My name is Chakra.” Without warning, she plopped herself into my lap, her left arm circling my neck and shoulders. I could feel the energy immediately. Her long, slim legs were now exposed, revealing tattoos that looked like bejeweled snakes enjoined in coitus.

  Her two friends moved around our table, Karma connecting with Penelope by placing her hands on my friend’s shoulders; Penelope, who is gay and kind of butch, at first resisted, then gradually relaxed into the touch. The one called Satori seduced Benny Bravo immediately, laying hands on the top of his shaved head.

  Chakra showed me her ring, which seemed to glow and change colors, the colors of the rainbow, as she spoke. “This is my chakra ring,” she whispered in my ear. “It’s like a mood ring. It shows what chakra I’m in from moment to moment. Red, the root chakra; orange, the sex center; yellow, the hara, or power center; green, for the heart; blue, the throat chakra; purple, the third eye; and white, the crown chakra.”

  I took a long look at the ring as the colors shifted hypnotically from one to the next. “Very interesting,” I managed. She definitely had my full attention. “And what color is it in now? Which chakra?”

  “Sitting physically close to you, look, the ring is bright orange—the second chakra, the sex center.”

  Sex center indeed. I put my hand on her exposed thigh. I felt myself slide into the second chakra. My shorts began to swell.

  Then my wife walked into the Third Eye.

  “Leela’s here,” whispered Hacker.

  I stood halfway up, dumping Chakra onto her feet, then sat down and placed a napkin over my telltale lap. Chakra leaned over and whispered in my ear, “Will you come?”

  “No…y-yes…m-maybe,” I sputtered, as I pushed the young woman in Hacker’s direction.

  Leela found her way to our table as the three Dakinis moved away and gradually out the door. My wife kissed me gently on the cheek, then sat down with a big smile on her face.

  “Wasn’t that the three Dakinis? The high priestesses from Kali’s temple?” asked Leela. “Did they bring an invitation from Kali?” She was grinning from ear to ear now.

  “Well, uh…” I stammered, but Hacker did an intervention.

  “They were just flirting with everybody,” said my friend. “You know how they work.”

  “Right,” said my psychic wife. “And you know what they say: one touch and it’s all over for you. A lifetime of sexual slavery.”

  “I’ll take my chances, sweetheart,” I tweaked back. “You know I’m a gambler.”

  “Leela,” interjected Dan Strange, breaking the growing tension at our table, “do you know anything about this accident up in the canyon yesterday? Does your psychic sense tell you anything?”

  “All I know is what I read in the papers,” she lied with a broad smile and a wink. “You know how these foolish people drive through the canyon: follow too close, drive too fast….So this doesn’t surprise me.”

  “I just channeled a message from one of my spirit guides,” said Past Life Penelope, her eyes tightly closed. “The people who crashed were aliens trying to escape from the black helicopters, which were sent from the secret military base in Boynton Canyon to destroy them. The aliens were on their way to the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff to make contact with their mothership and—”

  “Excuse me,” I interrupted, and stood up. I can’t stand this kind of New Age blather anymore; it drives me nuts. “Sorry, Penelope, but I have to run to the bathroom.” I started off, but then turned around with a closing comment:

  “Y’know, I have never heard of aliens riding around on Ducati motorcycles. That’s a new one!”

  Leela reached out and pinched the back of my thigh, hard. In a millisecond I realized what I had said.

  “Yo, dawg,” spoke up Benny Bravo, “who said anything about the bikes being Dukatis? The paper said the bikes couldn’t be I.D.’d. D’ya know something we should know?”

  “No,” I said, and my face must have started to turn red because I could feel it burning. “I must be psychic too.” And I stumbled to the men’s room, where I spent about five minutes trying to recover my composure.

  When I returned to our table the conversation had turned to other matters, like the crumbling economy, the many business closures in Sedona, and the number of people now living in their cars.

  “Leela, let’s go home. I’ve got a little good-bye present for you,” I said, squeezing her bare shoulder. “A surprise, kind of.” The surprise was in my pants, waiting impatiently for the presentation.

  “And I’ve got a little surprise for you, dear,” she said. “Let’s go now while I’m still in the mood.”

  Everyone at the table understood our not-so-subtle coital code, including Hacker, who looked a little exasperated. “I guess our meeting today is off, huh Marty?” he said.

  “No, let’s just postpone it until later and talk over dinner. If I have any energy left.”

  My seemingly oversexed wife grabbed me by the arm and hustled me out of the Third Eye Coffee House, into the scorching oven of a Sedona August morning.

  3 Free Bird

  Leela and I had what amounted to a quickie after we got home to our air- conditioned love nest. In the past we had enjoyed long, luxurious lovemaking sessions with generous foreplay, and either meditative, Tantra-style couplings or explorations of arcane Kama Sutra acrobatics. This tryst was a bit hurried, because my beloved had to pack and get ready for her helicopter trip from the Sedona airport to Sky Harbor Airport in Phoenix and thence to Washington, D.C.

  Leela wasn’t talking much about her business with the State Department, and I wasn’t asking any questions. She had a Secret clearance and that was that. Case closed. But I knew instinctively, and from overhearing the occasional phone conversation, that something big was brewing on the international scene. Something to do with eco-terrorism. Something frightening. And my wife seemed to be right in the middle of it.

  I took Leela to the Sedona airport to meet the waiting helicopter at five o’clock, and by six I was having dinner with Hacker at Sushi Town in West Sedona. We liked to sit in the funky outdoor patio, where we had our most private conversations. As a precaution, Hacker always scanned the place for bugs, using Microsoft’s Bug Cleaner software, an app on his iPad.

  “Clean,” he said, then cleared his throat. I knew this was going to be serious. Hacker and I had an agreement to be totally honest and up-front with each other. I met my good friend at our local microbrewery years ago when Leela and I first moved to Sedona, and we hit it off right away.

  Later he would design my awesome website, Sedona Confidential, and also its Web spinoff, the highly successful Soulmates4U. After I sold Soulmates for five large, I gave two mil to Hacker and a mil to a lovely lady named Jill, who was my former office assistant, a good friend of Leela’s, and also a former girlfriend of Hacker’s.

  “Marty, my main man, don’t keep me in suspense,” said Hacker. I knew this meeting was not for purposes of gossip, but out of his genuine concern for my relationship with Leela. He is like a member of our family; thus he has access to the most intimate details of my marriage. “What’s going on? What’s up with you and Leela?”

  “Okay, okay, dude,” I said, “I will tell all. As much as I know, that is. It’s almost as if Leela is leading a second life apart from our life together. Which, come to think of it, she is.”

  “Let’s start with yesterday, okay? I know you two took a trip up the canyon to Flagstaff on your souped-up Harley. Now, I do believe in coincidence, but I figure you two were somehow in the vicinity of the nasty business that occurred up there. Right?”

  “You are correct, my dear Hacker. Allow me to explain. Leela is involved in some stuff with the State Department that took her to a big conference in Moscow where some th
ugs from Eastern Europe also happened to be. She read their minds or something and saw dirty deeds written all over them. So she got ’em busted and locked away.

  “Then the friends of said thugs must have put out a contract on her pretty ass. They tracked her here. And yesterday, her pretty ass happened to be on the back of my Harley. So they, said thugs, tried to kill us by running my bike off the road.” I smiled weakly.

  Hacker looked at me with disbelief. “What? Okay, fine. These people tried to bump you off, literally. But how did two fancy bikes and a big Mercedes and four charbroiled humans wind up at the bottom of Oak Creek Canyon in a heap of twisted metal not to mention a huge fireball?

  “And one more thing, Marty,” continued Hacker. “I know your tongue was wagging overtime this morning at the Third Eye when you spilled the beans about the Ducati bikes. How would you know the make of the bikes unless you were there? C’mon, brother, don’t bullshit your old pal.”

  I sighed, then patiently explained to my friend how it had all happened: the thrilling chase up the canyon at high speeds, the Dukati bikes, the attempted bump-off, the miracle of my Harley heading off the cliff and suddenly taking to the air and landing safely a few feet away.

  Hacker closed his eyes, took several deep breaths, opened them, and looked at me in a curious way.

  “Marty, I know your wife has amazing psychic powers now. I know she can move objects with her mind. I know she can read people’s minds; she’s a freakin’ telepath, for chrissake. I know she can teleport her body when she is near the right power source, like what happened in Tibet, when she ‘jumped’—quote, unquote—from the top of that mountain all the way to India. But, but—”

  (My friend was referring to Leela’s most recent heroic exploit, whereby she put the kibosh on a plot to send China back to the Stone Age by some creeps who had wired up a bunch of energy vortexes to create an electromagnetic pulse. It’s a long story; I guess you had to be there.)

  “I know where you’re going, old buddy,” I said gently, knowing my friend was having trouble speaking his mind. “How can I live with a woman like that? The answer is: I don’t know if I can anymore. Though I’m still crazy about her. She’s beautiful, she’s brilliant, she’s sexy as hell, and we’ve been through a lot of stuff together. And I know we still love each other, whatever that means. But she’s on a mission now.

  “Also,” I went on, “I’m pretty sure that some very heavy shit is about to come down, and soon, regarding the planet and the environmental crisis. Leela says there’s going to be some real catastrophes if some serious action isn’t taken. She says it’s already too late for many places, like parts of Africa, where there just isn’t any more water. She says we’re all gonna have to pay the price for ignoring the warnings.”

  “Marty,” Hacker interrupted, “let’s get local. Did you know the county just approved that huge development near Prescott? And another monster project between Cottonwood and Sedona got approved too? Thousands and thousands of homes, three or four new golf courses, and we’re running out of water right here?”

  “That’s exactly the point, dude,” I said sadly. “Pretty soon we’re gonna turn on our water taps and nothing but brown sludge is gonna come out. Damn! The madness is spreading. Leela says she can help the world situation by using her psychic powers. It looks like the State Department agrees.”

  “I hate to say this, Marty, but I think that geek from the State Department—what’s his name, Anderson—also agrees. You told me she’s been hanging out with him in D.C. and that he was also on that trip to Moscow. Are you thinking what I’m thinking?”

  “Damn straight I am. I’ve always been suspicious of Mr. Anderson and his connection with Leela. But you know what, Hacker? She’s a free bird. I don’t own her, and she don’t own me. She can do what she wants. Jealousy has never been part of our relationship. Still….”

  “Still…what?”

  “Still, I’ve been thinking that it would be good to make sure she’s okay, you know? Kind of like tracking her electronically. To kind of keep track of her. Just audio would be enough so I know what’s goin’ on. Know what I’m sayin’?”

  Hacker couldn’t suppress a grin. “You mean a bug.”

  “Yeah, that’s it. A bug. Something she couldn’t suss out even with her great powers.”

  “I’m way ahead of you, my man. I must be psychic too. I started working on a bug to plant on Leela, then I stopped. I said to myself, you know what, Leela is a good friend of mine too. I don’t think I could do that to her. Plus, she would know immediately if there was a bug anywhere near her. Best if you just accept the ‘what is, is’ of the situation, ol’ buddy. Go with the flow and all that. You know the drill.”

  “Okay,” I said, “I can handle it; no problema.” Knowing full well that there was a problema. My marriage, for one thing. Was it really winding down? I had started to question the assumed integrity of our relationship. Was Leela getting it on with other guys? I had stayed faithful since the brief affair with Aura. Maybe it was time for me to reach out and touch someone…else.

  I downed the rest of my Chinese beer and poked at the remains of my California roll with a chopstick. “I’ve got another bright idea, Hacker. How about you and I pay a little visit to Ms. Kali’s erotic emporium in the next day or two? I’m kinda curious about what goes on out there. I’ve been hearing some pretty weird stories. And those Dakinis definitely rattle my chakras.”

  Hacker drained his beer and stood up, flapping his arms as if they were wings. He threw back his head and started singing:

  “’Cause I’m free as a bird now

  And this bird you cannot change.”

  “Lynyrd Skynyrd?” I said. “Free Bird?”

  “You got it, brother,” said Hacker. “Free bird indeed. Make the call and we’ll head out to Kali’s tomorrow.”

  4 Goddess Kali’s Tantric Temple

  It turned out that you couldn’t just drop in to Kali’s temple, like you might drop into Walgreens or the local Catholic church. You had to call ahead, give a full accounting of who you were and why you wanted to visit, and make a reservation for the next available tour.

  Hacker and I were having dinner at Moby’s, a hip new vegan restaurant in West Sedona. I told him I had already made the call, had thoroughly debased myself and agreed to all of their rules and regs, and made a reservation for the next available tour, which was the following day at one p.m.

  “Tour?!” thundered my friend. “What is this, a timeshare temple or something? Do they want a blood sample too? I thought this was just a bunch of ex-sex workers who had discovered Eastern religion. Or escort service girls going legit.”

  I calmed him down and tried to tell him more. He was angry about the whole adventure anyway; he never liked Goddess Kali in her earlier incarnations, and he thought Tantra was just another word for paying for sex, which was against his principles.

  “Their main deal is, look but don’t touch. Be respectful toward the Dakinis and Goddess Kali, and if you should happen to see her, which you probably won’t, but if you do, be sure to kneel down and kiss her feet. Don’t touch the sculptures of lingams and yonis, and—”

  “Whoa, whoa, hold it right there, dude,” said Hacker, pushing aside the remains of his black bean and tofu burger. “Kiss Kali’s feet? No way. I wasn’t impressed by the lady’s feet when she was known as Aura and even then her toes were too fat. Now I hear that she has put on about thirty pounds so those fat toes are probably even fatter. I don’t care if she’s become a goddess. I loathe and despise fat toes. These lips shall never meet those feet, I can assure you, my friend.”

  Case closed. For the time being.

  It is only fair to tell you that my friend John Hack is a dedicated, unapologetic, and incurable foot fetishist. He loves women’s feet the way most men love and admire—and obsess over—other female body parts: legs, eyes, hair, as
ses, ta-ta’s. He makes it clear that he loves feet, not shoes or other inanimate objects. Technically, Hacker is a podophiliac—a person who is sexually obsessed with feet. Romantically, he is the Don Juan of women’s feet.

  Hacker is a real ladies man anyway. Tall, good-looking and muscular, intelligent and witty, with finely-chiseled cheek bones, a strong, commanding jaw, curly silver-gray hair and penetrating gray eyes, my good buddy exudes an air of confidence without being obnoxiously “male.” He loves the ladies, and they love him. He keeps his love for their feet under wraps, but women say he gives the best foot massage in Northern Arizona. He is forty-five years old and always seems to be up and ready for a sexual encounter.

  Next day, under a killer blue sky, Hacker and I headed to Kali’s Tantric Temple. Excitement was in the air, which registered around 105 Fahrenheit at noon. He brought his stunning Porsche 911 Turbo to an abrupt stop at a red light at the intersection of State Route 89A (Sedona’s main drag) and Dry Creek Road.

  The subject of feet was still at the forefront of his mind, and he started rambling about his absolute refusal to kiss the feet of the goddess. “Are we clear on that, Marty?” he said. “I don’t want any misunderstandings when we get to this place, okay?”

  The light changed to green and Hacker floored it though the intersection and speed-shifted up the highway to punctuate his point.

  “Hacker, the odds are really against you having to kiss the fat feet of Goddess Kali today. So please relax. And turn left here.” His tires squealed as we turned left at Upper Red Rock Loop Road, zipped past the upscale Red Rock High School, and slammed around the tight and deadly curves of the narrow road that would take us to Kali’s temple.

  Another mile and we reached the gravel road which led to our destination. “Turn left here,” I said, my heart not surprisingly pounding with anticipation.

  “Hey, isn’t this where that cult—er, that religious community used to have their ashram?” asked Hacker.

  “Right on,” I said. “They were always controversial. Kind of a combination of Jesus and UFOs. Jesus was an alien, or something. The local newspaper wrote a bunch of scandalous articles, and they were basically driven out of town. They sold everything and left. Too bad. The disciples looked like retro hippies. The women were gorgeous with long hair and no makeup. Kali and friends must have bought their property. Fourteen acres, and most of it is right on Oak Creek. Look!”

  Straight ahead was what appeared to be the main building. Hacker and I gasped as we approached. “It looks like the freakin’ Taj Mahal!” my friend exclaimed.

  “Migawd,” I screeched. “No, to me it’s a cross between the Golden Temple in India and the Sacred Mosque in Mecca! Oh, wait, it kind of resembles the Kremlin. No, check that, Hacker, this must be some kind of hallucination, or perhaps a hologram created by the goddess. Drive on, my man, and we shall investigate Kali’s new digs.”

  What made us gasp and gawk was a gorgeous white marble structure, capped with domes, cupolas, soaring spires, gargoyles, and other symbols of the world’s great religions—minus the cross, of course—reaching at least three stories into the sky in utter defiance of Sedona’s height limits. (But this property lay in the county, safely out of the reach of Sedona’s bungling bureaucrats.)

  On either side of the temple were several low-lying wooden buildings, painted a bright burnt orange. Green grass was everywhere, rare in this high desert, plus clusters of familiar cactus and trees such as junipers, cottonwoods, various pines, oaks, maples, and weeping willows. A real Garden of Eden feel to the place. Construction workers scrambled over the facility with tools in hand, the whine of high-tech machinery ever-present.

  Hacker planted the Porsche in the paved parking lot and we moved toward the huge oak door of the temple. “Cameras,” said Hacker.

  “No doubt we are being watched, my friend,” I said.

  “Cameras in the sculptures,” he answered. “Check out their eyes: lenses.”

  The walkway was lined with marble sculptures of lingams and yonis, of buddhas and goddesses and Socrates and Lao Tzu and Chiang Tzu, and Shiva feeling up Shakti, plus many I didn’t recognize. The eyes in the sculptures followed us as we moved down the walkway. Inoffensive New Age music wafted from hidden speakers. The front door was locked, so I banged loudly with the knocker, a somewhat crude representation of the male genitalia, featuring, naturally, an erect member, cast in bronze.

  The door was opened slowly by another of the lovely Dakinis, this one wearing a flowing golden robe that just kissed the marble floor of the entryway. “I am Sundar,” she purred. “I will be your guide. Please remove your shoes, remain silent, and follow me.”

  Hacker and I exchanged a furtive glance. He shrugged; I rolled my eyes, wondering where all the money had come from to finance this enterprise. The ceilings in this joint were thirty feet high. First class all the way. The whole place bespoke of big bucks. We followed our guide down a long hallway with wooden doors on either side. The doors had no signs or labels as to what went on inside, but Sundar was helpful.

  “This room is for private Tantra sessions,” she indicated. “That room is for sensuous massage. And that room is for counseling. That room on the left is group Tantra.” And so on. The place was still a work in progress, with workers painting the walls and hanging artworks of goddesses. Hacker and I seemed to be the only civilians in the place.

  Our guide pointed upward, from whence issued a cacophony of construction noise. “The whole second level will be an auditorium for Goddess Kali’s darshans and other sacred events,” she said quietly. “The auditorium will eventually have space for five thousand seekers.”

  Hacker and I rolled our eyes and made choking sounds—five thousand seekers? That’s half the population of Sedona!—but Sundar ignored us and pointed with long, graceful fingers to another room nearby.

  “We will see a video in this room,” said Sundar (pronounced SOON-dhar, she had politely informed us). “My name is a Sanskrit word. Goddess Kali gave it to me. Means beautiful,” she had said. She was tall and wispy and smelled of jasmine, spoke in a sort of southern accent that sounded vaguely like Texas. She opened a double door and ushered us into a small theater that held about thirty seats and had a large screen in front. There were about twenty people already in the seats, mostly white men, looking like refugees from a timeshare presentation.

  The video was professionally made, with soaring New Age-type music and lavish attention paid to Sedona’s famous red rocks, but the most attention was paid to Goddess Kali herself—described as an “advanced consciousness” and “the ultimate embodiment of positive karma” and a “goddess among earth-bound deities.” Pretty extravagant praise for a former waitress and threadbare psychic. Oh, and she did look to have gained at least thirty pounds since the last time I had, uh, seen her.

  But let’s start at the beginning of the video. A female narrator described what Tantra is and isn’t, behind sexy graphics from the Kama Sutra. “A great misunderstanding has arisen over just what Tantra is all about,” she said. “To many people, it just means sex—different ways of having sex, with different kinds of partners, usually based around some kind of ritual.

  “To Goddess Kali,” she continued, “Tantra means expansion of consciousness. Transformation. Opening to life in all of its totality. To be present to the moment. To…”

  She went on like that for a good two minutes, spouting all of the New Age clichés of the day about chakras and sharing energy and opening our hearts and living our truth and moving toward the light. I was getting bored and Hacker was squirming in his seat, although the narrator herself was now on the screen, a real doll in flowing robes with mucho cleavage and blond hair spilling over her shoulders.

  Tight close-up on the lady as she revealed the good stuff: “You will work with partners here. You will have orgasmic experiences here. Yes. And more. Once you transcend the barriers of your
busy mind and surrender to Goddess Kali, you will learn to perform amazing feats. Unimaginable feats.” I nudged Hacker with an elbow and he banged his knee into mine. We sat forward in our seats.

  Video: Three women and one man sitting in meditation in a beautiful desert garden and slowly levitating skyward a good twenty-five feet, then hovering there for a full thirty seconds before floating back to the earth.

  Voiceover: “You will quickly learn the secrets of levitation.”

  Video: Dissolve to: A series of quick cuts of various locations in the world. The Taj Mahal, the Beijing skyline, the Grand Canyon, crop circles in England, a slum in Rio de Janeiro, a look down at the Earth from a satellite, a beach on some exotic island, and more, and more.

  Voiceover: “Imagine being able to travel anywhere you want to go…with remote viewing. No muss, no fuss, no airport security. Enjoy total freedom with Goddess Kali’s secret technique. Also, you will also learn how to perform lucid dreaming and create beautiful, unlimited dreams.”

  There was more: The secrets of telepathy, of teleportation, of moving objects with the mind, of healing others as well as oneself. Some wild promises that it was possible to learn and experience all of this through Goddess Kali. And all of this narration delivered in a soft, non-aggressive manner, almost like a TV commercial for a new drug to help you sleep.

  The video ended; the lights went up. The entire audience sat silent and stunned for several seconds. “Where do we sign up?” I whispered jokingly to my friend. Hacker gave me a hard, ugly look.

  The tour was over. Our guide gave us two colorful brochures on the Tantric Temple’s various programs, and ushered us out the front door.

  On the way back to West Sedona, as we sailed down 89A, Hacker seemed tense and angry.

  “What’s up, brother?” I asked innocently.

  “It’s all a bunch of bullshit,” he grumbled. “You know it’s too good to be true. There’s something…sinister about the whole thing. What’s up with this Kali? Your ex-girlfriend. Is she collecting souls or something?”

  “First,” I countered, “she is not my ex-girlfriend. Let me be clear on that. We had a little fling back in the day, which I still regret, so let’s just say it was a spontaneous energy exchange. Harmless. My wife never found out, but she probably knows on some level.

  “Now, when that weirdness happened out at Bell Rock, Kali, or Aura, or Alexis, was some kind of half-baked psychic who was chasing and photographing orbs and gets struck by lightning and winds up in the hospital basically untouched, which is pretty weird right there, and then becomes some kind of different person. And now she’s a goddess with her own temple, promising miracles to the unwashed masses!”

  “Thanks for the recap, bro’, I know all that, especially the part about shagging the goddess, or the half-baked psychic, but what do you really think happened out there on Bell Rock? You were there, you saw the whole thing. Tell the Hacker everything you remember.”

  “I dunno, Hacker. It was pretty surreal. A wild thunder and lightning show, pouring rain, chaos, my wife disappears, Aura gets struck by a huge bolt, which I saw with me own eyes, the weird electrical smell in the air…then the medics come and then the cops and I pass out. Leela thinks that during the storm Aura was invaded or taken over by these orbs from another dimension, but, you know, she believes that stuff. I don’t.”

  “But you saw these orbs, right? What in the friggin’ hell is an orb? What’s it look like? I read in some New Age rag that you can only see the things in photos, digital or whatever.”

  “Okay, okay. I saw—I thought I saw—these glowing little balls of light, flying and floating all around the place. About the size of a golf ball, maybe a baseball. Like I said, it was raining like hell and lightning strikes every few seconds, so I wasn’t sure of anything. So this bolt hits Aura on the top of her head, and it looks like—looks like, dude—one of the freakin’ orbs follows the bolt into her freakin’ head!”

  “Hey, Marty, you weren’t on any serious drugs, right? Smokin’ weed up there or maybe you had dropped some Ecstasy?”

  “No way, my brother, not around either one of these psychics. They say it interferes with their connection to Spirit. Or the Great Spirit. I dunno. Anyway, Leela had disappeared, so I was kinda looking out for her, and after the bolt smacks Aura and she’s on the ground, Leela shows up and she’s dancing around in the rain—starkers. Friggin’ naked.”

  “Wish I’d been there with my camcorder, dude,” jibes my old friend. “That scene would have gotten millions of hits on YouTube.”

  “Take me home, Hacker,” I said, tired of the questioning. “I gotta meditate on all this. There is something very strange going on here. Leela is off to god-knows-where on some secret gig for the warmonger U.S. gummint. Some tacky broad I balled a lifetime ago is suddenly a freakin’ sex guru selling miracles after an orb enters her skull. I don’t get the big picture yet.”

  “Don’t forget the hot sex scene with you and Aura in her hospital bed,” chided Hacker. “After the weirdness on Bell Rock. You told me it was like sex on acid, remember?”

  “Yeah, yeah,” I sighed. “How could I forget? It was more like being sucked into a throbbing vortex—on acid. Maybe I was really shagging an orb in a woman’s body.”

  “There is more to this than meets the eye,” said Hacker, falling into his annoying Sherlock Holmes shtick, as he pulled a sharp left on Mountain Shadows Drive to take me to my remote hideaway. “The game’s a-foot, Watson,” he continued, irritatingly. I didn’t miss the pun.

  “No shit, Sherlock,” I fired back. “The foot is the game for you, right? Meet me tomorrow morning at the Third Eye and we’ll compare notes with our buddies. Let’s see what the word is on the street. And what about Jill? How do you think she fits in?”

  You’ll recall that Jill and Hacker were once an item. It was very intense for a while. Then Jill wanted some space. Hacker was devastated.

  He ignored my “what about Jill” question. We arrived at my house and parked in the driveway, as Hacker looked straight ahead, obviously in pain.

  “Jill holds the key,” I said, disregarding the awkward silence. I wasn’t trying to hurt my friend with a painful reminder. I needed information. “She’s been working with Leela. She knows things.”

  “Maybe,” said Hacker sadly, as I carefully closed the Porsche passenger door. “And Jill also has the most beautiful feet in Sedona. Maybe in the whole Western hemisphere.”

  5 Everything Is Bugged

  The Third Eye was abuzz with activity when I walked in a few minutes after nine a.m. All of the twelve or so tables were filled with talking, laughing, excited people. Most seemed to be locals, with a few tourists hanging around the fringes. The new breakfast bar was in full operation, serving up all the pastries and muffins and sandwiches that a microwave and toaster oven could handle.

  The young, dark-eyed, bleached blonde behind the counter had recently graduated from Red Rock High School, had ambitions to be a Sedona psychic, and had been coming on to me since she started working at the Third Eye a few weeks ago. She said her name was Destiny—yet another mono-named person, common in Sedona.

  “Yo, Desty, whazzup?” I said as I approached the counter. “How ’bout a nice cuppa house coffee, black, for your Uncle Marty?”

  “Marty,” she sighed, her black tank top providing a revealing look at tight, ample teenage breasts, unencumbered by a bra. The words “Ask me about the vortex” were printed in red across the front of the garment. She put her face close to mine and sent a faint breeze of sweet breath my way.

  “Pisces, right?” she said, not blinking. “Aries rising?”

  “Libra,” I answered, “and I don’t know my rising sign. I think my moon is in Uranus.”

  She giggled. “That’s pronounced ‘YER-a-nus,’ not ‘your anus,’ silly.”

  “Whatever,” I said. “Your anus, my anus. Can I just get
a cup of java?”

  She didn’t back away, and now I noticed that her soft hand covered my hand. “Marty, I love your eyes. Are they blue or are they green? I can never tell for sure when I see you in here. Hey, listen, can I do your whole chart sometime? Just tell me when and where you were born and I’ll do the rest. Call me here when you’re ready and we’ll get together, okay?”

  “Destiny, how old are you?”

  “Eighteen. Actually, I’ll be eighteen in October. Scorpio. You know.”

  “Right. How about some coffee, and I’ll call you when I’m ready.” I didn’t bite on her offer, although she was a lovely morsel—and my wife was out of town.

  I took my steaming cup over to the round oak table where my friends and I usually gathered. Hacker was there already, giving me a strange look. Claude “Picasso” Imperioli was waving a colorful brochure, laughing and commenting on the various items contained on its pages. It was the same brochure that Hacker and I had been handed the day before at Kali’s Tantric Temple.

  “Hey, Marty, look at this—a menu of Tantric services they serve up at Goddess Kali’s place!”

  “This is your kinda action, dude,” snickered Benny Bravo. “Matter o’ fact, ah hears you and the Hackerman made the scene up there yesterday. How’d it go?”

  “I hate it when you talk in that mixed-up street dialect, señor,” I cracked. “Please be either a yid or a beaner. Or else a straight-shootin’ citizen of the US of A.” Benny’s consciousness was somewhere between La Bamba and Hava Nagila. He was probably the only Mexican in Arizona who had had a Bar Mitzvah.

  “Yo, jefe, but please share with us, your fan base and support team: Did you and Señor Hack get any action up there yesterday wit’ dem putas?” Bravo was a short, intense, funny-looking brother, with a Jewish nose, a shaved head, and tattoos from elbows to shoulders. He was one hell of an investigative reporter, however, real smart and persistent, and was writing for several websites that specialized in exposés and scandal.

  “Okay, okay,” I said, my cover blown, “how did you wise guys know that we were there yesterday? We didn’t tell anyone. We were on a mission.”

  “It’s a small town, Marty,” piped up Dan Strange. “News travels fast.”

  “Plus,” said Picasso, “we all know a guy who was in the same audience for the video as you guys. He wondered if you signed up for anything.”

  “He did,” said Benny. “This cabrón plunked down his three grand for the first level. The ladies call it ‘The Cleansing.’ Supposed to clean out all the do-do that’s in your cabeza. So’s they can fill it back up with their own bullshit, I guess. Turn your brain into a goddess burrito or somethin’.”

  Hacker laughed and shook his head. “Three grand. Unbelievable.”

  “Gimme a break,” I muttered. “No wonder they can duplicate the Taj Mahal out there.”

  “But take a look at their brochure,” insisted Picasso. Neither Hacker nor I had bothered to examine it yet; we should have.

  “Check it out,” said the long-winded Picasso. “‘Astral Tantra. You will learn how to travel via your astral body and never leave your easy chair. Go anywhere you want, even off-planet. Remote viewing also possible.’

  “And this one: ‘Techno Tantra. Music that affects your brain wave patterns and puts you in a higher state of consciousness. You will be able to read people’s minds and channel ancient entities with this technique. Warning: Brain damage can occur with overexposure to this music.’”

  “You’d have to be brain damaged to even go into this bullshit,” muttered Hacker. “Tell us more, Picasso.”

  “I like this one: ‘Past Lives Tantra. Recall and relive your past lives with our guaranteed Tantric exercises. With or without a partner. Results guaranteed.’”

  Our table was stunned into silence as Picasso read on: “This one must be the ultimate: ‘Cloud Tantra. The pathway to living in a permanent higher state of consciousness. Enlightenment can become your reality. Learn how you can live forever with this unique form of Tantra.’ Wow,” said Picasso.

  “Whew!” was all I could say. Hacker was muttering to himself. We all took a collective deep breath. Past Lives Penelope, who had been silent up to now, spoke up, with fear in her eyes.

  “This is all very dark, dear friends. I have an ominous feeling about Kali and her Tantric circus. She has some heavy karma to work out. I have seen her past lives. I fear for all of us and everyone in Sedona and—”

  “It’s okay, Pen, Hacker and I are on the case,” I said reassuringly. “We have lifetimes of good karma on our side.” Hacker nodded in agreement.

  “Your lives are in danger,” answered Penelope. “Be very careful….”

  “Speaking of lives,” I said, “has anyone heard anything more about those people who went over the cliff into Oak Creek Canyon? There’s been nothing in our local paper, or the daily rag down in Phoenix, or on TV that I know about. Anybody…?”

  “Yo, I called mi amigos at the Sedona PD and at the Sheriff’s, and nobody’s talking,” said Benny. “They said the investigation is ongoing, and, you know, the usual bullshit. So I called my buds at the FBI and they said they were on the case but couldn’t talk about it yet. Know what it smells like to me? Cover-up. Big time. International stuff. Very, very suspicious.”

  “Suspicious is right,” I said. “Penny? Have you channeled any I.D. on those people who burned up in the fire?”

  Before she could answer, my secure cell phone, the one in my pants pocket which is set to “vibrate,” started doing its dance. I checked the display. It was Jill. Just the person I needed to see.

  I stood up quickly. “Excuse me, guys, gotta pick this one up,” and headed out the back door of the Third Eye.

  I flipped open the handset. “Jill! Where are you?”

  “Look up and to your left. I’m in the parking lot in my car. Come talk to me.”

  I found her silver Lexus and hopped into the passenger side. We had a big, juicy hug. I hadn’t seen Jill for months. She looked great: tanned, toned, and excited.

  She spoke first. “Marty, I’ve got to talk to you. Immediately. It’s about Leela, it’s about what’s been going on, it’s—” She stopped abruptly.

  “Is Leela all right? Where is she? Have you heard from her? I’ve been sending her e-mails, but she hasn’t answered.”

  “Marty, we’ve gotta meet someplace to talk. Everything is bugged. They’re listening. Your table at the Third Eye is bugged. Your house, Hacker’s house, bugged for sure. Your phones, your cars, bugged. Maybe my house too. Look, get in your car and meet me at our spot. You know, the spot. Don’t say any more here, okay?”

  “Got it. See you there.”

  I got out of her car and headed for my own wheels in the parking lot. My head was spinning. I certainly knew the spot. It was out in Boynton Canyon, a place known as Mystic Vista. It was where Jill once channeled a transmission from Leela from several thousand miles away.

  Knowing my car could have been bugged gave me a creepy feeling. I turned on the car stereo as I headed to our rendezvous, punched in some numbers for the Stones’ “Stray Cat Blues,” and sang along as loudly as I could.

  There were a lot of questions. Jill would have some answers. I hoped. I kept one eye on the rear view mirror to make sure I wasn't being followed as I swung the car onto Dry Creek Road and headed for the rendezvous spot.

  6 Ecological Blackmail

  Mystic Vista is located in the shadow of the awesome red rocks of Boynton Canyon, not far from the sprawling Enchanted Forest Resort and far enough (about four miles) from the amphetamine rush of traffic on main street Sedona. Not many people know of Mystic Vista.  It is considered an energy vortex by the local cognoscenti; clueless tourists know it only as a lovely, quiet spot to take a short, easy hike. Sometimes a local Jeep tour company would bring their customers here for a quickie “secret trail” adventu
re, but not often, so the place was usually deserted.  

  There are only two parking spaces at the trailhead.  I pulled my all-electric Honda Lightning into one of the spaces, turned off the silent engine, lowered the windows, and breathed in the amazingly fresh air.  The smell of pine was overwhelming, intoxicating.  

  Two minutes later Jill pulled her hybrid Lexus into the other space.  She got out and we nodded silently to each other, then proceeded up the dirt road, Jill in the lead.  The first quarter mile or so is a deeply rutted track, so intimidating that only an experienced and fearless Jeep driver would dare to negotiate it.  Then the road levels out and takes the intrepid hiker through a forest of juniper, manzanita, and piñon pine.  Cactus thrives here as well—a community of cacti, welcoming the rare visitor with bright colors and otherworldly shapes.

  Nearly a mile in, a little path takes you to a small atoll known as Mystic Vista.  We had arrived.  I had been busily studying the local flora as well as keeping an eye on Jill’s shapely backside, which was encased in a pair of tight designer jeans.

  They say Sedona has four major energy vortexes.  Mystic Vista is the fifth vortex, the one they don’t talk about, and maybe the most powerful of them all.  The energy was palpable on Mystic Vista that day.  Jill watched as I spun around and around, like a Sufi mystic, a whirling dervish soaking up the energy.  She took me by the arm and led me to a spot on the atoll that overlooked a small valley below, and beyond that, the high desert forest dotted with juniper and cactus.

  Gently, Jill guided me to sit on a section of crimson red slickrock under the sheltering arms of an ancient alligator juniper tree.  We sat facing each other, legs folded neatly, as if we were about to meditate together.  Jill held me with her mesmerizing hazel eyes, set in a heart-shaped face, long brown hair cascading around her shoulders. She wore a yellow t-shirt with the letters “OM” stenciled across the front. A floppy straw hat protected her delicate skin from the blazing sun.

  It was near the end of summer, which in Sedona can stretch all the way to mid-November.  The monsoon season was winding down, another dismal summer for precipitation, but there were hopeful, fluffy clouds floating in the blue sky with just a hint of rain contained in them.  Jill looked funky and ancient and lived-in and high as a kite, all at the same time.  She was beautiful and alive.  She had things to tell me.

  A word about Jill:  She came to Sedona about five years ago to start a new life, as so many others do, and to get away from an abusive husband.  The guy was a talented singer-songwriter, name of Jack Robbins, and Jill was the other half of a duet called Jack & Jill.  Jack unfortunately got into hard drugs. Jill was into yoga, which wasn’t compatible with Jack’s drug habits or his violent rages, so she packed it up and moved to red rock country.

  When she arrived in Sedona, I was riding a wave of financial success and notoriety with my website, Sedona Confidential.  I needed some help, so I ran an ad in the local paper for an assistant, she answered it, and I hired her.  

  Jill and Hacker hooked up after a brief flirtation in my office. Jill later played a major role in a plot to take down no less than the entire nation of China. Out of that nightmarish business, Jill and Leela formed a psychic bond.  In fact, on the very spot where Jill and I sat on that beautiful pre-autumn day, Jill had channeled a critical message from Leela which came all the way from Tibet.

  “Jill, I have a lot of questions,” I said firmly, looking this magical woman directly in the eyes. “Hard questions.”

  “First question,” she said simply in her velvet voice, melting my hard edge immediately.

  “Okay, why are we being bugged? Who is bugging us? What the hell is going on anyway?”

  “The answers to those questions will emerge the more we talk, Marty. I’ll just say now that Leela and I think the bugging is being done by the U.S. Government—by the State Department, the FBI, the NSA, the CIA. Yeah, our own government. You know that Leela and I work for the State Department, and we are on to some pretty serious stuff. So the big boys, the ones in the black suits, want to know what we are doing and who we are talking to.”

  “No doubt. So me and Hacker are on the quote-unquote watch list because of our, uh, our relationships with our wives and girlfriends.”

  “Well…yeah. Sorta. You got that about half-right,” said Jill, mysteriously.

  “Okay, the big questions,” I said. “Where is Leela?  Is she safe?  Some people tried to kill us up in Oak Creek Canyon the other day.  What was that about?” I could feel a deep trembling begin somewhere deep in my guts, just below the bottom of the rib cage.

  I closed my eyes and took a deep breath. Jill waited patiently. “And Leela pulled off some incredible hocus-pocus to save our asses up there—some kind of psychic mind trick. She won’t tell me anything about what she’s involved in. It’s all top secret. Jill, I…our…we…okay, our marriage is in the toilet. I don’t even know this person anymore. And we’ve been together a long time.” I was on the verge of sobbing uncontrollably.

  Jill leaned forward and put her hands on my shoulders.

  “Marty, Marty,” she half-whispered, “I’m sorry it’s come down this way.” She paused a beat, tossed her long hair back with a jerk of her head. I caught myself on the razor’s edge of tears, straightened up, and smiled grimly. Real men don’t cry, I thought, cringing inwardly.

  “Real men do cry, Marty. Real men do show their—”

  “Jill, did you just…” Damn! She did read my mind! I temporarily forgot that this stunning woman was a gifted telepath.

  “Listen carefully,” said Jill, continuing on as if nothing had just happened. “Leela is fine. She is safe. She is in deep cover somewhere in Europe, probably London. You know about the State Department. Check. You kinda know she was at an environmental conference in Moscow and looked into some people’s minds and saw what they were planning to do. Check. Then she called in Interpol and four bad guys got locked up somewhere, now awaiting trial. And then some people who are connected with the bad guys tried to force you and Leela off the road and down into Oak Creek Canyon.”

  “Yeah, they tried to bump us off. Literally. Off the friggin’ cliff, two thousand feet straight down to a fiery death.” I snickered inwardly at my little joke. “But who are these bad guys and what are they up to? Is this the Russian mafia or something?”

  “Eco-terrorists. They are into eco-blackmail. And much worse. This is an international cabal, Marty, bigger than you can imagine.” She paused and spread her arms wide, palms up. “You know our planet is facing an environmental catastrophe.”

  I couldn’t help smirking. I had never really bought the concept of global warming. It had just seemed like a PR stunt to me, some kind of propaganda to make some rich guys richer. That was one of the issues between Leela and me. She was hardcore on climate change.

  “Well, you know, Jill, after I closed down Sedona Confidential I became an environmentalist, sort of. Hacker designed my new website—you know, SedonaGoGreen.org—and we have big plans to take it national and start selling eco-friendly products for the green revolution.”

  Jill’s eyes danced and she quickly covered her mouth with the back of a hand to stifle a laugh. The laugh trickled out anyway. “Marty, you dear, sweet, naïve boy. I know you’re a clever guy, cuz I used to work for you! And you constantly surprised me with your smarts and your awareness. But this is serious. This is—”

  “Jill,” I interrupted, “I damn well know what’s going on. I saw it on the History Channel last week. ‘Last days of life on earth’ or something like that. Too much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Climate change. Hotter every year. By 2050, the oceans will rise and everybody has to leave New York and London. Icebergs melt. Greenland disappears. So? We won’t be here to see it. By 2050, sweetheart. Maybe later. Fifty years, a hundred years.”

  “How about in six months?” she said calmly. “Maybe a year at the most.”<
br />
  “Wha—”

  “In the next six months,” Jill explained, “we will see things happen on this planet that are totally beyond belief.  I mean catastrophes.  Big time.  And not just natural disasters, which were already happening because of human greed and stupidity.

  “No, Marty, it’s much worse than that. Because there are people on this earth who want to make money on our environmental collapse, on human misery.  These people are already making money—big money, billions—just on threats and blackmail alone.”

  “Well, just who is behind all this?” I asked, already feeling mentally exhausted from inputting too much information. “And I suppose my dear wife is right in the middle of this international intrigue, trying to save the world?”

  “Listen, Marty,” said Jill sternly, “it’s because of Leela that a huge chemical complex in Germany, Düsseldorf, you know, near the Belgium border, wasn’t blown up by a suicide bomber.  If that had been carried out, it would have sent a cloud of chlorine gas for hundreds of miles downwind, and killed or sickened millions of people.  Leela read this plot in the minds of these four fellows—saw it like a movie, she told me—and helped to get them locked away.  As well as about twenty other people that were involved in the scheme.”

  “B-but why did they come after her in Sedona?  How did they know that she was the one who fingered them?”

  “Well, I didn’t want to tell you just yet, but here goes anyway. I guess you’re ready for this….”

  I closed my eyes, waiting.  I could feel my jaw clench and unclench.

  “There is a mole in the State Department.  Someone who ratted out Leela.  Now, Leela thinks she knows who it is, a translator who was at the conference.  A young woman.  Apparently a double agent who works for the other side. Leela is pretty sure this person is psi too.  She is the only one we know of who is able to mask her thoughts around Leela.  An American. Name’s Tanya.”

  “Jesus H. Christ,” I sputtered. “You mean, Jill, that this snitch fingered Leela and sent a gang of hitmen to our little hometown of Sedona, Arizona, where the biggest crimes are drunk driving and domestic abuse? That this bitch nearly got us bumped off by professional killers?”

  “That’s right, Marty. That’s just about right.”

  “That is fuckin’ amazing, Jill. I feel like we should go over there right now and whup some ass and bring Leela home. But where is ‘there’? And who really is behind all this eco-terrorism?”

  “They call themselves Black Swan. The name comes from some book about unexpected events changing the course of history, or something like that. It’s an international cabal, Marty.  It’s huge.  

  “It started in Russia with some billionaires who cashed in when the Soviet Union collapsed.  The Americans got involved when Bush Two stole the election in year Two Thousand. Most of its elite members are rich and powerful.  There are two U.S. congressmen involved, plus high-powered lobbyists, and several bigwigs from American corporations and Wall Street. Plus bigshots from other countries whose names we are unfamiliar with so far.”

  “Wow,” I said, feeling smaller and smaller.

  “This is the intel straight from Leela, Marty. Top secret. The media hasn’t touched it yet. It’s all hush-hush. These people are very well connected, including control of the media. Plus they have an enforcement arm called The Brotherhood, which is a bunch of hired guns and strong-arm types mainly from Eastern Europe, places like Bulgaria, Serbia, Albania. That’s who came after you and Leela in Oak Creek Canyon.”

  “So just what is their scam? What kind of ‘eco-terrorists’ are we dealing with?”

  “Blackmail, mainly.  They warn a government what they intend to do, then put a price on not doing it.  The starting price is about one billion euros.  Leela has picked up a lot of gossip and random thought forms during her travels in Europe, so much of this stuff is still unconfirmed.

  “Supposedly these thugs have the technology to trigger all kinds of environmental disasters.  Earthquakes.  Floods. Droughts.  Glacier melting. Gigantic oil spills. They have developed micro-nuclear devices that could set off everything from an avalanche on the Matterhorn to a nine-point mega-quake off the coast of California. Plus there is a suspicion that they are tampering with the Internet. Too soon to know, though.”

  “Jill, I really hope that this isn’t just another wild-eyed conspiracy story ripped from the pages of supermarket tabloids,” I said, with a little too much glib. I saw Jill squirm. But I had heard enough conspiracy theories over the years, especially related to global warming, to add this one to the cuckoo column.

  Jill stiffened slightly, her eyes blazing. Obviously, she was getting exasperated with me. Then she sighed, let her shoulders drop. “Marty, this is no fiction. And it’s no joke. Leela doesn’t speculate. She is in the heads of a lot of people and this is the information she has picked up. So far. And it’s pretty scary.

  “Marty, I am truly frightened by what could happen to our planet,” continued Jill, and now those expressive eyes conveyed her for-real fear.  “These criminals, if they don’t get what they want, they could accelerate the whole ecological disaster that we’ve been talking about for years. They could literally take us beyond the tipping point, to where the planet’s defensive systems start to turn on us.”

  “Just what do they want, Jill? These guys seem to have money, power, political control….What more do they want?”

  “There are rumors, Marty, rumors that Leela has picked up and stuff I have overheard in State Department meetings. Something about a space station…a moon colony…exploring the solar system…a drug that lets you live forever. This is where it starts getting really weird. That they need trillions of dollars and euros to carry out their wild schemes. All of this is pure rumor so far.”

  I took several deep breaths, exhaled mightily, and raised my arms to the sky.  “Jill, I know this is what you’ve heard, ’cuz you don’t bullshit.  But, really…blackmail? Ecological blackmail?  That’s how they figure to finance this project?  What are they, religious fanatics or something, trying to escape Armageddon by escaping to the moon?”

  Jill didn’t answer, just looked at me. So I stood up and stretched, reaching for the moon, which hadn’t yet risen.  Jill stood up too, and I held her hands and looked into her eyes.  I could feel the Southwest sun on my neck and bare arms.  I wanted to take a shower, or jump into a swimming pool.  The information shared by Jill made me feel kinda creepy and contaminated. And my wife was apparently in the middle of all this. Location unknown.

  “Jill, this sounds like real madness.  I know you haven’t told me everything.  That’s okay.  But just tell me one thing….”

  “Marty, I told you Leela’s okay.  Not to worry.”  She paused.  “Too much.”

  “You said she was in deep cover somewhere.  Where is she?  What is she doing?”

  “Marty, I hope you’re ready for this.  It’s getting hot here.  Let’s take a little walk.”

  The sun blazed down on us. Jill took me by the hand and led me down the trail that would take us deeper into the mysteries of Mystic Vista.  I felt like I was floating on a cushion of air.  A Monarch butterfly landed on my shoulder, and stayed there.  A raven called to me from somewhere deep in the forest.

  7 Bonding on the Astral Plane

  Jill and I walked for several minutes over a narrow, barely visible trail into an inner sanctum I didn’t know existed.  It was actually a small grove of juniper trees, with a pair of ancient alligator junipers standing like sentinels at the entrance to the grove.

  The trees shielded us from the blazing sun.  Wild grasses covered the hard, rocky earth.  A family of agave cactus, representing several generations, stood guard on the perimeter of our little retreat.  Jill invited me to sit on a red rock that looked like a rocking chair.  She sat on the grass opposite me.

  Again Jill fixed me with those soulful eyes.  “Marty,” she said,
“please listen carefully.  Leela has taken on a new identity.  In fact, she has taken on several identities. She has changed her appearance drastically.  You probably wouldn’t recognize your own wife.  Right now she is playing the role of a BBC television reporter.  She has dark curly hair, wears brown contact lenses, has a great upper class accent, and has put on about twenty pounds.”

  I shook my head.  “My Leela?  Twenty pounds? And what is this doing for the cause of truth and justice, this being a BBC reporter?”

  “It gives her entry into some pretty high places.  Right now she is doing a series called ‘Captains of International Industry.’  She has already done on-camera interviews with three members of the Black Swan cabal.  Most of these guys have huge egos and legit corporate fronts.  You can actually see her work on cable TV.  She’s good!  And the only people who know what she’s up to are the top BBC execs and our State Department.”

  I sighed heavily and tried to picture Leela interviewing these deadly big shots.  Why?  Why?

  “Why?” said Jill, as if she were in on the conversation going on in my head.  I was slowly getting used to her telepathic talents.  “Because she can look into the darkness of their minds.  She has been trained to say certain keywords during the interviews that trigger thoughts and images in the minds of her subjects.  Words like crisis, shortage, ocean….You know, the mind is just a micro-computer.  Leela is activating these guys’ left brains while she’s flirting with their right brains.”

  “Flirting?  Does she have to, you’ll pardon the expression, fuck these guys to read their minds?”

  “No, no, Marty, no sex.  Just innocent flirtations.  Just to get the story.  Anyway, she throws out these keywords.  It’s all very scientific. Using this technique, she has already scanned the minds of these creeps and stopped a scheme to blow up a dam on the Yellow River in China, which would have disrupted the lives of millions of innocent people; she has stopped a really ugly plan to release kilos of anthrax on three trains of the Paris Metro; she—”

  “Jill, Jill, Jill!” I interrupted.  “Stop!  Please stop!  What in hell is Leela doing in the middle of this terrorist nonsense! Where is that freaking mole who exposed her in Moscow?  It sounds like Leela is totally vulnerable and needs a friend, or a husband around, or something.  Maybe I need to book a flight to Heathrow right away.”

  I started to get up, but Jill extended her hands, palms down, in a kind of calming gesture.  “Marty, relax, please.  Leela is fine as of right now.  The mole is not in London. Her next assignment for the State Department is in Capetown, half a world away; Leela arranged that to keep Tanya at arm’s length.  Next Leela goes to Paris to cover a big conference for the BBC.  So she’s fine.”

  I breathed a big sigh of relief and felt my muscles gradually de-stress.   “Okay, Jill, now please answer for me a couple of questions.  First.  How do you know all this stuff? I doubt if you and Leela are talking on the phone or sending e-mails. Leela hasn’t answered any of my e-mails. It’s almost like she doesn’t know me anymore.”

  “Marty, do you have a secure e-mail account? Are you running your e-mails through a server that can’t be hacked or messed with by some agents working for god knows who? No, I didn’t think so.”

  Jill locked her hands behind her head and eyed me playfully.  “Marty, your wife and I have become very close.  Every day at the same time we…communicate.  It’s a telepathic transmission.  Except now it’s like a two-way conversation.  We’ve gotten very good at it.  It’s like Instant Messaging, but totally secure.

  “Leela and I made several trips to that trans-dimensional portal at the Indian ruins not long ago, sometimes going into it together. It was pretty intense. And it really expanded the range of our telepathic abilities.  So you could say that we bonded on the astral plane.”

  I remembered that Jill first realized that she was a telepath back when Leela had been kidnapped by a bunch of crazies who dropped her off on top of a sacred mountain in Tibet.  You remember, the guys playing with vortex energy who wanted to take out China.

  Leela had sent a brief telepathic message to Jill in my Sedona office, letting us know that she was all right.  Jill was shocked at the time that she could receive a telepathic transmission.  A few days later Jill actually channeled Leela’s voice and mannerisms, a phenomenon that occurred right here at Mystic Vista.  But how, I wondered—

  “You’re wondering how I know what Leela looks like in her disguise, what setting she’s in, if she’s safe or not…right?”

  “Right.”

  “Remote viewing, Marty.  With remote viewing I can transport my consciousness to wherever Leela is at any given moment.  It takes a lot of energy and I’m exhausted afterward, so I don’t do it very often.  Only when I feel I need to.  And part of my job with the State Department is to report to my superiors what Leela is up to.  

  “And by the way, you do know I can read your mind, right?  When I want to.  I’m not snooping.  I’m very discreet.”

  “So then you already know my next question,” I said.  “Is she sleeping with this Anderson dude from the State Department, the one she’s always running off with on some assignment or other?”

  “Marty, that one is off limits.  I’m a telepath, not a gossip.  I don’t do remote viewing into Leela’s bedroom.  If I knew, I wouldn’t tell.  And if she is sleeping with Mr. Anderson, what does it matter, really?”

  “Well, I—”  She had me there.  Leela and I didn’t exactly have an “open” relationship, but there was an understanding that we maintain a certain level of marital fidelity.  Or so I thought.  Infidelity in the line of duty, well, that’s one level.  Shagging the nubile teenager from the local coffee house?  The jury is still out on that one. My brief affair with Aura slash Goddess Kali? Too weird to think about now. So maybe a “don’t ask don’t tell” policy would best apply to our marriage contract.

  “One more question, Jill.”  I looked up at the sky.  Fluffy cumulus clouds had begun forming overhead, strange shapes like dragons and spaceships and bunnies with the heads of rats.  Could blessed rain be coming soon?  Our little alcove began to darken.  I looked at Jill and began to mentally undress her.  Remembering her telepathic talents, I quickly tried to cloud my mind and shifted my thoughts to eating ice cream, watching a professional basketball game, hiking up Thunder Mountain, recalling James Cagney in “White Heat.”

  “One more question, Marty.  Go ahead.  Something about a movie?”

  “You and Hacker were an item for quite a while.  I had never seen him so happy.  Now it seems you have dumped him, and he’s been depressed and angry ever since.  Care to fill me in?  It will go no further than right here.”

  She laughed.  “Sure, guy, sure.  Okay, Hacker already knows why I can’t date him anymore.  I love him, I suppose, and probably always will, but he’s a player.  He has to have a lot of girlfriends going at the same time.  Oh, you know, the man is obsessed with my feet, but I don’t mind that.  In fact, I kinda like the attention.  What I don’t like is that there are a lot of strange diseases going around out there, and Mr. Hack refuses to use a condom.  Plus I don’t like being a member of his harem.  Satisfied?”

  Jill stood up.  I stood up.  I moved toward her, wanting a big hug to seal the deal and put a cap on our amazing conversation.  But I had a problem:  An erection for the ages, the mother of all boners. This woman was like an aphrodisiac to me. Her mere presence was a total turn-on. And, it didn’t take a psychic to figure out what I had in mind. The setting was perfect for a little tryst.

  Jill extended her arms, holding me back.  “Forget it, Marty.  You know it’s not possible.  Not now, anyway.”  Her voice grew soft and very kind, as if she knew I couldn’t help it, that my erection was purely a force of nature, the end product of millions of years of evolution.  Or perhaps it was just the vortex energy working on me.

  The woman had compassion.  She took me by the arm and
led me gently back to the main trail, me stumbling and lurching, beyond embarrassment. “Come on, big guy, let’s go back.  It’s getting late.”

  I don’t remember the hike back to our cars at the trailhead.  I do remember Jill taking me by the shoulders, looking into my eyes, her face inches away from mine, and saying, “It would be better if you didn’t stay in your house for a while.  There is still a possibility that there are hired killers from Black Swan hanging around Sedona.  I’ll keep my psychic senses open.”  

  I nodded numbly. “And remember that our own government has planted bugs everywhere, so be careful what you say and who you say it to.  I think you should lay low right now. Maybe you could stay in Hacker’s cabin on the creek for a few weeks. He’ll know if there are any bugs. I’ll stay in touch and give you updates on Leela.”

  I looked Jill in the eyes and kissed her gently on the cheek.  No words were needed. It was dusk. The smell of a distant forest fire wafted past my nostrils.  The coyotes were already out, yipping and barking and yowling; I figured they were talking about an early dinner, raw bunny rabbit a la carte.  I was hungry too.  And for some reason, I felt as if I was just coming out of a trance.  

  8 Not Quite the Tipping Point

  Three Months Later

  Driving down the main drag through Uptown Sedona on a frosty winter morning, I noticed how light the traffic was. Uptown, the main tourist ghetto and economic engine for the area, was practically devoid of visitors. A light dusting of snow still accented the red rocks, fresh from last night’s snowfall. This time of year is definitely not the height of tourist season, but still, the town felt deserted.

  In a way, it was. The economic crunch had badly crippled Sedona’s only industry, tourism. Many businesses were shuttered; whole office complexes were vacant. The housing crisis had hit Sedona big time, and many upscale homes had been foreclosed. Business in Uptown restaurants and shops and hotels was lousy too; workers fled to nearby towns to find jobs. Driving along the quiet, lonely highway, I had a strong feeling of entropy, as if the whole enterprise called Sedona was winding down.

  Leela and I had first come to Red Rock Country in the mid-nineties, and had fallen in love with the place immediately. We moved in, got jobs, got a loan, bought a house. I worked as a waiter and a tour guide; Leela worked in Uptown tourist shops for paltry wages until she looked around and saw that a lot of people she knew were making big money as psychics. Since she had some pretty strong psychic abilities, she decided to become a professional, a working psychic reader.

  I’ll cop to something right now: I was a major scoffer when it came to the New Age, which used to permeate the Sedona atmosphere like a giant gas cloud. Millions came to Sedona, like pilgrims to Lourdes, for psychic readings, to have miracle healings, to discuss UFO sightings and abductions, and basically to rub shoulders with those of us who lived among the mysterious vortex energies of the red rocks.

  I scoffed until my wife started making some big money as a practicing psychic, and finally became a believer when I realized I was living with a rare being possessed of powers that defied the laws of physics. Not only could Leela move objects with her mind and teleport herself from one location to another, she could see the future and read people’s minds and transmit messages to other telepaths. She was also pretty good at remote viewing.

  All this was a little hard to accept for me, basically a country boy from hardy and practical Midwestern stock, German and Swedish DNA on one side and English roots on the motherly side. I grew up in Omaha, back when the winters were so brutal you wanted to curl up and die. Now, of course, winter in Omaha is so warm that homeless people can actually sleep outside in December. Climate change, perhaps?

  My father was an executive for an insurance company. He had a nasty, scary temper. He claimed he didn’t have a drinking problem, but he downed two six-packs of Schlitz beer a day. He died of a heart attack at age fifty-five. My mother was a former high school beauty queen, vain and self-absorbed. She smoked like a chimney, had several nervous breakdowns, and died of lung cancer at sixty-two. I guess longevity is not on my side. What the hell.

  I barreled through West Sedona, which also was shrouded in a cloud of gloom. “Going out of business sale” signs were everywhere. I had been staying, at Jill’s suggestion, at Hacker’s cozy little cabin up in Oak Creek Canyon. Hacker had scanned the whole place and declared it free of bugs—that is, hidden recording devices.

  Over the past three months I had met with Jill every few days for updates on Leela’s activities. We met at a different spot each time, usually on one of Sedona’s many hiking trails. Although I still lusted after Jill—but only in my mind, which Jill of course was keenly aware of—she made sure our relationship stayed on the platonic level. Leela was doing fine, Jill said, safe and relatively secure, supposedly watched over by that Anderson dude of the State Department.

  According to Jill: After her BBC gig, Leela had changed disguises several times, next passing as an overweight secretary to the British ambassador to Italy; then as a glamorous, cleavage-baring cocktail waitress in a swank lounge frequented by the rich, famous, and politically connected in Lucerne, Switzerland; and finally as a personal trainer who accompanied her client, a powerful Israeli arms dealer, wherever her deadly business took her.

  All of these transmutations brought Leela into contact with—or in the vicinity of—many leaders and various lieutenants of the Black Swan organization. Consequently she was able to glean vital information from their unsuspecting minds. This often came in the form of images, not words, thus bypassing gaps in her knowledge of languages. (Although she did speak fairly respectable French.) She then passed on the information to her handlers in the State Department. This stolen intel helped to thwart several deadly schemes in the cabal’s agenda of environmental destruction. More than a hundred people were arrested by Interpol as the result of Leela’s efforts in the past three months.

  Except for my meetings with Jill, and a visit from Hacker about once a week, I had been relatively out of touch with the outside world. I didn’t watch TV, except for old movies downloaded from the Web, nor did I visit my favorite news sites on the Internet; I didn’t want to contaminate my mind. I spent my time reading Sherlock Holmes and James Bond books from Hacker’s quirky library; meditating down by the creek, which was just fifty feet from the cabin’s back door; doing a little writing on my book, “The Way of the Psychic;” and taking long walks in the forest. I thought about Leela often, but I didn’t worry about her safety. Her adventures in Europe seemed like a TV soap opera—distant and surreal. Jill’s updates helped my state of mind, and seeing her often helped the state of my heart. I was falling for this woman, big time.

  One frigid evening Hacker and I sat huddled around the cheery fireplace in his cabin, sipping from crystal beakers filled with warm Courvoisier, having already sampled his new stash of gourmet weed from Humboldt County, California. It had been snowing for an hour, so Hacker decided to spend the night—on the convertible couch in the living room, since I had already claimed ownership of the luxurious king size bed.

  Hacker leaned back in his rocking chair and gave me The Eye, that penetrating look of his that signals a “don’t bullshit me” attitude. “How’s Jill?” he asked. “I know you been seein’ her for info on Leela, ’cuz you told me you were. But really, how is she?”

  “She is a fine, fine lady, bro,” I said. “Too bad you—”

  “Never mind,” said my friend. “I know all about the ‘fine lady’ and the ‘too bad.’ You wouldn’t be, uh, getting’ it on with her, would you?”

  I could see by his body language, his slumped broad shoulders, that he didn’t really want to know if I was. “No, man, I’m not. And if I was, I probably wouldn’t tell you. Besides, that would be too close to home,” I said.

  Hacker looked out the window at the falling snow and quickly changed the subject. “Hey, Dude, you said you’re not w
atching the news these days, but some really weird stuff is happening out in the world. I think you should know.”

  I nodded, vaguely interested. The world and its troubles seemed far away.

  “You know there’s this thing going on called global warming, right?” he said sarcastically. “Well, dig it: A huge piece of Greenland just fell into the ocean. The ocean got pissed off about this and now they’re evacuating coastal towns like Dover in England and Le Havre in France because the ocean levels got raised about a foot or three.”

  “Uh huh,” I muttered, slowly nodding off. Actually, my snotty, unconcerned attitude was mainly an act. Jill had sworn me to secrecy re the Black Swan organization and their eco-terrorism campaign. I couldn’t even tell Hacker, my best male friend, what I knew about the eco-disasters caused by human mischief. Yet.

  “And a huge earthquake in Upstate New York last week, and another big quake in Indonesia and a tsunami hit the South Pacific, and fires everywhere and all kinds of weird weather stuff. And food riots in Africa and people running out of water and—”

  “Hacker, thanks for the intel, man, but this sounds like old news. Plus earthquakes and tsunamis are not caused by global warming. Look, I gotta go nighty-night now. You’ll excuse me,” I said, as I struggled to my feet and headed for the master bedroom.

  “Check the TV news, Marty,” my friend called after me. “I think you oughta know about these happenings. Something strange is in the air.”

  Something strange, indeed. Hacker should only know. Well, he will soon enough, I rationalized.

  I closed the bedroom door with his words ringing in my ears. I had vivid, nightmarish dreams that night, mainly about Leela in scary, dangerous situations. In the morning Hacker was gone. He left a pipeful of his premium ganja with a note: “Start your day with Superweed. Yes indeed!”