Second contact, p.8
Second Contact, page 8
part #2 of Not Alone Series
Dan rolled his eyes a few times when the news media exhibited their penchant for fear-mongering, lacking concern partly because he had a first-hand understanding of how they operated but mainly because he knew there was nothing to be scared of. He understood that fear itself could become a problem at some point if people became hysterical amid the media’s best efforts to revive the narrative of potential hostility, but this concern was mild; after all, he had to believe that the Messengers were too smart to ever let it get to that stage.
Several requests for interviews arrived in Dan’s dormant social media accounts, but his desire to engage with anyone could not have been lower. Via the Social Media Meta Analysis software on his computer — a purchase inspired by the powerful app he’d first seen on Emma’s phone — Dan could track how often he was discussed across all platforms. He saw a few very noticeable spikes from the previous twelve hours, with the highest coming after a name-check by Joe Crabbe during the professional agitator’s appearance on Blitz News.
It pleased Dan that his discussion-based popularity now spiked when other people mentioned him, rather than the other way around as used to be the case. His efforts to maintain a low profile throughout the past year had evidently paid off, and he didn’t normally mind the occasional mention from someone like Crabbe; because as the long-term trend graphs showed, the attention always faded quickly enough.
This time, however, he had a feeling it would be different. This time the attention wouldn’t stay faded for long, he thought, because something told him that the Kerguelen bolide was just the first stage of a much broader happening.
Dan couldn’t pretend he wasn’t disappointed that nothing else had happened overnight, whether it was another bolide or whatever else, but he still refused to even consider the possibility of coincidence. Kerguelen was too remote for that, as pretty much everyone else seemed to agree, but he had an even stronger reason to be confident.
To Dan, the near-paralysing twinge in his neck during the incident could only mean one thing: the Messengers had intervened.
The Messengers, without doubt, were close.
C minus 82
10 Downing Street
London, England
“Surely now?” John Cole said, pointing to his television and no longer even trying to hide his exasperation at Jack Neal’s repeated calls for patience. “Chinese GSC guards intimidating Western tourists? It writes itself!”
To Cole’s mind, the time to hit Godfrey had been immediately after the Kerguelen bolide. It was written in the stars, he told Jack, citing the near-blinding irony of the fact that Dan McCarthy’s decision to leak the infamous IDA documents in the first place had coincided with a march against Godfrey’s leadership just as the bolide had coincided with one against Cole’s.
The big difference was that Godfrey had been forced to seize upon McCarthy’s leak out of sheer desperation in the hours before a huge protest was set to close down central London for the day, whereas Cole had now been presented with an opportunity to entrench a relatively strong position just one day after a well-timed downpour had saved his own blushes by postponing his detractors’ big day out.
Cole, never one to miss an opportunity to look strong, had stood defiantly in the storm and promised the handful of hardy camera crews outside Number Ten that no act of God, man or nature would ever hold him back from doing his utmost to keep Britain safe. With no umbrella or jacket, Cole was soaked to the bone in a T-shirt emblazoned with the faces of several recent victims of terrorist attacks; a T-shirt he wore despite most of those victims’ families pleading with him not to.
And since then, to Cole’s mind, his position had only gotten stronger. “If the time’s not now, when the hell is it?” he asked.
Jack Neal stood his ground: “Soon.”
Jack was playing a difficult game in attempting to temper the worst of Cole’s impatience without tipping him over the edge, and on some occasions this required exaggerated words. One such instance had come only a day earlier when Jack boasted that he had more than enough ammunition to hurt Dan McCarthy via Emma Ford should Dan involve himself on the wrong side of certain issues.
Despite their differences, Jack had no desire to hurt Emma, his former protégé, and he considered his raising of the possibility to be a regrettably necessary way of stopping Cole from diving head-first into anything foolish, as he might if he ever came to think that Jack was unwilling or unable to act decisively.
“I swear…” Cole moaned, “if Slater gets in first because you make me wait too—”
“She won’t say anything firm on this, boss,” Jack insisted. “She probably won’t say anything at all; you know how she’s been lately.”
It was certainly true that both President Slater and Chairman Godfrey had been very reserved in their public manner over the last few months, almost as though they were deliberately staying out of all difficult controversies in the expectation that with enough rope, Cole would eventually hang himself. Another posited reason for their lack of personal engagement, referenced by the media on both sides of the Atlantic, was that everyone by now knew that it was impossible to come out of any spat with John Cole looking good.
Indeed, when Cole had on occasion directed testing jabs in the direction of his former mentor, Godfrey had brushed them off and overtly asserted that he knew better than to wrestle with a chimney-sweep and expect to come out clean.
President Slater, meanwhile, mentioned Cole as rarely as possible. Her approval ratings were too high to risk getting drawn into any petty spats, and most balanced observers now tended to consider her a competent president who had been tremendously unlucky to be in office during the tumultuous months of Richard Walker’s self-inflicted fall from grace.
“So how soon is soon?” Cole asked, champing at the bit to make Godfrey’s life difficult by driving a well-placed wedge between him and the Chinese government over the potentially combustible situation at Namtso.
The combination of a flair for controversy like Cole’s and a PR intellect like Jack’s was tailor-made for the prevailing political climate — one in which any idea that couldn’t be condensed into a quotable five-second soundbite was widely seen as one not worth having — and Cole saw every moment when they weren’t making the most of their synergistic gifts as a moment wasted.
Jack leaned back in his chair. “Boss, anything we say in the next two hours will have a shelf life of two hours.”
“What are you talking about?”
“This came in from one of my Italian sources,” Jack said, flicking through some photos on his phone and settling on the right one. “A courier transported it to the Cavalieri Observatory a few days ago.”
“Is that Fiore’s place?” Cole asked as he reached for the phone.
“The very same. I don’t know what he’s going to talk about when he addresses the media in two hours, but I think it’s safe to say that if it’s anything to do with this photo…”
“Godfrey’s going to have a shit-fit,” Cole beamed, his eyes wide in delighted surprise. “He’ll be all over the place! Distracted. Vulnerable. Ripe for the picking!”
Jack nodded slowly and put his phone back in his pocket. “One of these days, you’re going to realise that I really do know what I’m doing, boss,” he said through a thin smile.
Cole said nothing, but he had never been more glad to have Jack Neal at his side.
C minus 81
McCarthy Residence
Birchwood, Colorado
At 8am, Clark pressed the intercom button on the basement door to tell Dan that Emma was there to see him.
Dan opened the door to find Clark in his police uniform and Emma dressed even more smartly than ever.
“I don’t have long,” Emma said, walking down the stairs. “I just wanted to see how you’re doing and tell you that I’ll be in the city all day. I’ve gotta deal with some stupid campaign emergency. Not even my client… it’s a favour to someone I owe more than a few.”
“It’s going to be a long day at the precinct, too,” Clark said. “No one will shut up about Kerguelen from the minute I get there.”
When Clark had started his new job, the presence of someone moderately famous had been a novelty for his colleagues. To his relief, that novelty had faded quickly enough; but now, just like general interest in everything else related to the Messengers, Clark himself was going to be a focus of attention all over again in the aftermath of the Kerguelen bolide.
“So how are you doing?” Emma asked Dan. She didn’t sit down, clearly serious about not having much time. “Have you been awake all night?”
Dan shook his head. “I got like three, maybe three-and-a-half hours of sleep,” he said, speaking without irony as though this was comfortably enough.
Emma then glanced up to the scrolling trend-ticker, seeing a new and rapidly trending post from Billy Kendrick which plainly stated his firm belief that the bolide was a deliberate sign from the Messengers and which ended with the upbeat sign-off: “It’s a good time to be alive!”
She pointed up to the scrolling text. “See? I’m willing to accept it was them. Okay? You felt it. I believe you. But look at that: Billy thinks it was a sign. Pretty much everyone does. If this was a message for you, like you think it is, why would it be so public? They could call you somewhere, like before. Or even if, for some totally unknown reason, they were determined to use a meteor to catch your attention… why wouldn’t it be somewhere like Lolo? Somewhere that we know is relevant, but somewhere no one else cares about?”
Dan pursed his lips and nodded slightly in recognition of what were undeniably fair and measured questions.
“She’s right, man,” Clark chimed in. He too was nodding, taking another long look at Dan’s in-depth Heilig research, at his many densely annotated maps, and at his large posters of the three already-discovered plaques. “And the aliens are on our side. So even if they did want to tell us something important and to do it specifically through you… why would it be so cryptic?”
Henry’s voice played over the intercom before Dan had a chance to answer. “Emma,” he called.
Dan turned to face her. “Are you getting a cab into the city?”
She shook her head.
Dan then held the intercom button to speak to Henry. “What is it?” he asked.
“Her phone is ringing,” Henry replied.
As Dan and Clark both knew, an extremely small number of people were whitelisted to be allowed straight through on Emma’s phone outside of business hours.
“Tara,” Emma suddenly said, clicking her fingers as it hit her. “She’s due back in town tomorrow.”
“Oh, goodie,” Clark said under his breath.
Emma laughed, hearing Clark’s words and wordlessly sharing his lack of enthusiasm.
“What’s wrong with Tara?” Dan asked. He had only met Emma’s younger sister a few times, but she’d always seemed nice enough. “Hurry up and pick up, anyway. She might need something.”
“She always does,” Emma said. “That’s the point.”
Henry was holding out Emma’s phone when she opened the door. “It stopped,” he said. “I didn’t want to answer it.”
Emma took it from his hand. “Thanks. Did it say it was Tara?”
He shrugged. “I didn’t unclip the case.”
After looking at the screen for several seconds, Emma handed her phone back to Henry and asked him to put it back on the coffee table. “It’s nothing important. Thanks again, though.”
“Sure thing.”
When Emma re-closed the basement door and turned around, Dan spoke first. “You could at least call her back and say you can’t talk right now. She’ll be sitting somewhere wondering why you didn’t take her call.”
“Get your shoes,” Emma said, pointing to the pair on Dan’s floor. “Clark — yours too, wherever they are. We’re going to my place. My phone won’t work down here and we can’t call him upstairs when your dad’s there.”
“Call who?” Clark asked, this time beating Dan to the punch. “Who’s the him?”
“Starts with T…” Emma said, turning back to the door. “Rhymes with Nemo.”
C minus 80
Ford Residence
Birchwood, Colorado
“There’s just no way this house is the same size as ours,” Clark said, repeating a frequent thought as he sank into the plush circular couch in the corner of Emma’s spacious living room.
Emma and Dan, more focused on the issue at hand, wasted no time in getting down to it.
“Do you know anything about the thing Timo is doing today?” Emma asked.
Dan shrugged. “I know he’s doing it, and I know that it was originally supposed to be next week. The fact that he’s bringing it forward must mean it has something to do with Kerguelen, right?”
“It doesn’t have to mean that,” Emma said. “Obviously today is a good day to publicise anything remotely linked to Kerguelen or aliens or anything like that, but it’s also a perfect day to bury bad news. You know Timo as well as I do, and that guy has his fingers in a lot of pies… he could be closing a company or announcing a sell-off or something like that.”
“Why would he invite the press for that? And why would it be at the observatory?”
“To try and spin whatever he’s doing as a good thing, probably. That might be why he wants to talk to me: for some last-minute advice. Maybe he’s closing the observatory? Maybe he’s selling it? We’re about to find out.”
Emma then held a finger to her lips as the phone rang.
“Ah, Emma!” Timo said, greeting her as warmly as he had when he welcomed the trio into his second home at Lake Maggiore a year earlier. “I’m so glad you called back. How is everything? Dan, Clark, Birchwood? All well, I hope.”
“Everything’s pretty busy,” she replied. “I actually have to leave in a couple of minutes. Did you need something urgent?”
“In that case, I will be brief. I’m coming to New York on Sunday, Emma — for a Focus 20/20 taping. I want you to be there.”
“Are you sure about that?” she asked. “You weren’t listed in the preliminary lineup I saw last night.”
“They’ll find a space when they see my surprise in a few hours. So, can I count on you?”
Emma turned to Dan, who held up his right thumb. “So long as you’re definitely on the panel and you’re willing to meet my fee,” she said. “Sure thing.”
“How much is your fee?”
“Timo… if you have to ask, you can’t afford it.”
He laughed heartily down the line. “I’ll try to scrape some funds together from somewhere.”
“Can I speak?” Dan mouthed silently.
Emma gave him the phone.
“Hey, Timo,” Dan said.
“Dan! What a pleasant surprise. And do I have a surprise for you, my friend. I only wish you were here to see it for yourself.”
“What is it?” Dan asked, not even trying to hide his childlike excitement. “Did you find something out about the bolide?”
Clark jumped up from the comfortable couch and moved towards his younger brother, ready to grab the phone if he sensed Dan’s words heading in a prohibited direction. Dan tried to shoo him away with his hand, nodding and mouthing “I know!” to make it clear that he wasn’t going to say anything he’d regret.
“No, no, no. It’s nothing like that,” Timo said. “I just wanted to make the most of some fortuitous timing.”
“So what are you doing at your media thing? What’s the surprise?”
“Oh, nothing much,” Timo said with a boyish tone of his own. Dan could almost hear him smiling all the way from Italy. “Just unilaterally ending William Godfrey’s illegitimate monopoly on deep-space research and exploration.”
Dan’s eyes lit up like the bolide itself.
“And that’s not all, Dan. I have been working on something else; something for our Messenger friends.”
Having heard these words through the phone, Clark now moved even closer to Dan, ready to grab it at any second. It wasn’t that he thought Dan would say anything on purpose, but the danger of a slip-up was always there.
“I really do need to get going,” Emma interjected.
“At least give me a clue,” Dan said to Timo, ignoring the hint. “The announcement isn’t for two whole hours.”
Timo chuckled warmly at Dan’s enthusiasm. “One clue,” he agreed. “And then I hang up.”
“Deal,” Dan said, leaning away from Emma as she spun her finger in the air in a ‘hurry up’ motion.
“I am looking at it right now,” Timo said, sounding almost like a proud parent. “And I am calling her… Reciprocity.”
Part 2
Reciprocity
“Truth is the only safe ground
to stand upon.”
Elizabeth Cady Stanton
C minus 79
Cavalieri Observatory
Trento, Italy
“I’m glad that you could all make it,” Timo Fiore said, addressing the few dozen reporters who had rushed to his flagship observatory at very short notice. He sat alone at a long desk in the observatory’s lavishly decorated media room, dressed in a pastel blue suit and a white shirt. “And I can assure you that you will be glad you did.”
To his left, a large object lay covered by many national flags. The reporters, from their vantage point, could only see the handful of flags on one side of the object: those of the United States, the United Kingdom, China, Russia, Argentina, Norway, France, and Italy.
Timo’s suit-and-tie combination bore more than a passing resemblance to the Argentine flag, which in turn evoked strong memories of the moment when a mysterious sphere, discovered off the coast of Miramar and raised from the ocean in a shark cage, had been wheeled into public view with that very flag draped over it until the grand reveal. The symbolism was so overt that no one had to ask whether it was intentional, but Timo had firmly instructed the reporters to focus on his words until the time came for the object to be unveiled.
