Second Contact, page 16
part #2 of Not Alone Series
Walker then coughed violently for several seconds, as though trying to bring up something that wasn’t there.
“Are you okay?” Dan asked.
Walker stood up and poured himself a glass of water, then opened a pillbox next to the sink and swallowed a few pills. Slightly further along the counter, Dan saw a small cardboard box with several warning stickers covering most of the side. He could make out the word morphine.
“Are you dying?” Dan asked, not trying to be blunt but not trying not to be.
Walker almost smiled. “Everyone is dying, McCarthy; some of us are just further along than others.”
“What’s wrong with you?”
“It doesn’t matter.”
Dan wasn’t going to get an answer and, as cold as it may have sounded, this wasn’t exactly the main thing on his mind. “So what’ll happen to Rooster?” he asked, moving on to something he did care about.
“Joe should come straight out here if I don’t push that button within any 72-hour period,” Walker explained, pointing to a red button on the wall next to the refrigerator. “Joe Crabbe, that is; the only other person who knows where I am. When the time comes, he’ll take care of Rooster.”
“What do you mean ‘take care’ of him?”
“Jesus, McCarthy!” Walker snapped. “Give him a good home, what the hell do you think? Joe and I might be a lot of things, but that doesn’t mean we go around ‘taking care’ of innocent dogs! But anyway, we both know that this is bigger than me. You can look at the airburst at Kerguelen as a lucky break, just like the idiots have always looked at Tunguska as a lucky break since a blast that large could have flattened a city, but we should be taking it as a warning. That’s not to say we couldn’t have been even luckier at Kerguelen… if that meteor had come in a few miles further east, right over the island, Billy Kendrick might have been out of our hair.”
Walker grinned at his own joke, the thin scar between his lips and ear more prominent than ever thanks to the paleness of the surrounding skin.
“But seriously, McCarthy,” he went on, “we’re not going to be lucky forever, and the GSC isn’t going to keep us safe when that luck runs out. Hell, they’re working right now to turn the luck around and wipe us out.”
“Kerguelen wasn’t a warning from nature,” Dan said. “It was a message from them.”
Walker’s bloodshot eyes narrowed in focus. “A message about what?”
“If they wanted you to know, you would know.”
“Do you know?”
Dan hesitated. He thought he knew — he thought he knew it was a clue about the location of the imminent fourth plaque — but did he truly know? “I know more than you,” was the response he settled on.
“Well I know that that crop circle sure as hell wasn’t there yesterday,” Walker said. “And I’m assuming they called you here tonight?”
“Let’s just say I didn’t come for the hospitality.”
Walker tapped the table and laughed heartily. His smile then faded as he looked at Dan, and his expression quickly morphed into something between sorrow and pity. “I wish it hadn’t had to be like this,” he said. “I wish we didn’t have a president so weak that the only way to stop China was to push the emergency stop button we came up with all those years ago in case the Soviets ever got the upper hand. Call me sentimental, McCarthy, but even though I had to do it, I wish I’d picked someone else. I probably could have made it work with Kendrick, and he would have deserved all the mess that came his way. I picked you precisely because you were so naive and straightforward… the very traits that made it so difficult for you to deal with everything. And to be blunt about this, I don’t think it would have even worked with you if Ford hadn’t shown up to help you out when she did.”
“Was that supposed to be an apology?” Dan asked, surprised to hear anything like it from Walker but an eternity away from ever forgiving him.
Walker shook his head. “No. I just want you to know that I didn’t fully consider the effect this would have on you. And if I’d thought for a second that they were actually real, I would have done things very differently.”
“I think it’s time for me to go,” Dan said, rising to his feet. “Thanks for the pen.”
Walker and Rooster both followed Dan out of the kitchen. “Do you want something for your feet?” Walker asked, noticing only now that Dan had walked the whole way from Birchwood in a barefoot daze.
Dan shook his head. “Thanks for the offer, but I’m not walking a single step in your shoes.”
“Suit yourself. But listen carefully, McCarthy: I want you to realise that you have an emergency stop button at your disposal, just like I did. If things get dirty with the GSC and our country is in trouble, you’ll always have the nuclear option of telling everyone what really happened. You’ll always have the nuclear option of capital-F, capital-D… Full Disclosure. I would do it myself, but I’m not convinced they would let me and I’m not convinced anyone would believe me, no matter how much evidence I presented.”
Dan didn’t say anything; he knew that Full Disclosure was decisively off the table and he certainly didn’t need to ask who Walker meant by ‘they’.
As Rooster lay down again, Walker opened the door. “I have nothing to apologise for,” he said, placing a large but frail hand on Dan’s shoulder. “But just remember: when the time comes… neither do you.”
C minus 57
Drive-in
Birchwood, Colorado
“He knew the rules,” Phil Norris insisted, ignoring Mr Byrd’s attempts to soften his position regarding Clark’s recently revoked meal-card. “I don’t care how much he’s done for this place, he knew the rules and he chose to break them.”
Mr Byrd, always softly spoken, sighed lightly. “Come on, Phil. It’s not like he was taking extra food to sell it or even to stash it at home, he was trying to give some food to a bum.”
“Phil was right to take the card,” Henry McCarthy interjected, sick of listening to an argument that was going nowhere so late in the night. “Clark did know the rules. All I’ll say is that from experience, I think keeping hold of it for a few days will be long enough to make the point. He might not be as book-smart as Dan, but he’s better at learning lessons. If it were me, I’d give him back the card sometime next week.”
Phil and Mr Byrd both appeared to see merit in Henry’s middle ground, and nothing else on the subject was said.
“And speaking of me being right,” Phil said with a gloating chuckle, pointing towards the TV as an ad ran for the following night’s Focus 20/20 panel. “See that, Henry Boy? There you were on Wednesday night telling me that Emma wouldn’t get involved in any of this — what was it you said? — ‘any more of the media crap’… and here we are three days later and she’s in New York with Timo Fiore. You can take the girl out of the business, but you can’t take the business out of the girl!”
Mr Byrd, who felt that he knew Emma a lot better than Phil did, shook his head slowly. “She’s helping Timo out, that’s all.”
“Exactly,” Henry said. “No one in Birchwood except you and your bank manager wants any more media bullshit, Norris. Emma’s not doing this as a publicity thing and even if she has to put herself in front of a camera once or twice, there’s no way the boys are going to get sucked into any of that. So yeah, you’re about as right as you usually are… i.e. wrong.”
Phil watched the end of the ad, taking in a lineup which included Timo, William Godfrey, Joe Crabbe and Billy Kendrick; all highly familiar faces from Dan’s highly public misadventures of the previous year. “We’ll see,” was all he said. “We’ll see…”
C minus 56
Gravesen Hotel
Manhattan, New York
In the small hours of the night, Emma sat on the edge of her plush bed in one of the New York Gravesen’s most expensive suites. Timo, footing the bill for both this suite and his own, had called it a night several hours earlier after an intensive research and prep session ahead of his high-pressure appearance on Focus 20/20 the next day, but Emma still had several more working hours ahead of her.
Every now and again she took a break from analysing recent comments from the rest of the panel’s lineup and looked down at the cold streets she didn’t miss, where she had spent many busy years working at the XPR agency founded by her former mentor Jack Neal.
Jack was set to be among Timo’s fellow panelists, as the frequent TV ads and giant billboard displays made sure everyone knew. Emma and Timo passed two digital billboards advertising the show on their way to the hotel, and analysts were already predicting that this upcoming episode of Focus 20/20 would draw viewing figures only previously seen by the record-breaking episode immediately preceding the UN meeting which led to the GSC’s creation a year earlier.
Recent events — chiefly the Kerguelen bolide and Timo’s announcement of his plans to unilaterally break the GSC’s worldwide monopoly on space-based research — made the network’s pre-announced decision to have a GSC-themed episode look extremely timely, and the makeup of the upcoming panel bore more than a passing resemblance to the record-breaker of the previous year, with five of the six participants returning.
Joe Crabbe, Jack Neal and William Godfrey would all be in the studio once again, while Timo Fiore would this time be present in person and Billy Kendrick would appear live via satellite as Timo had last time out. Only newspaper editor Jan Gellar had not been invited to return; this was primarily because she was no longer personally relevant, which she had been during coverage of the IDA leak, but it was also in part due to her frequent hawking of The Daily Chat and other Blitz Media properties while appearing on the rival network which broadcast Focus 20/20.
Every time Emma looked out at the lights of Manhattan, the only place she wanted to be was Birchwood. A giant cosmetics ad featuring none other than her sister Tara was visible from one part of the corner suite’s huge window-like wall, and this only made the longing stronger.
Despite their differences, Emma liked to see Tara doing well — but that didn’t change the fact that she wasn’t overly comfortable leaving her next door to Dan, particularly given his indefensible decision to pull the rug out from under Emma and Clark’s feet by going against everything they had agreed and unilaterally deciding to bring Timo in on the secret.
It didn’t matter that Timo’s response had been just about as positive as it could have been; what mattered was that Dan had betrayed her trust not merely by telling Timo, but by telling him at a time that left her with nowhere to go and no option but to play hardball with the richest man in the world. And while Dan saw Timo as a fun guy to be around, Emma understood that with money came power, and just as pertinently that anyone as willing as Timo was to stand toe-to-toe with the might of William Godfrey’s GSC was not someone to be taken lightly.
Fortunately, her carrot and stick approach seemed to have worked, and her decision to promise Timo the full details only once he made it through Focus 20/20 without saying the wrong thing certainly appeared to have won his cooperation. Like her, Timo was now aching to get back to Colorado, so much so that he had already made arrangements to squeeze his Italian media engagements into a single day and night to enable the promptest possible return.
But while Timo eagerly wanted to get back to candidly discuss everything with Dan — who he believed must have had a very good reason to keep quiet about the hoax for so long — Emma’s current view of Dan was somewhat less favourable, to say the least.
She similarly knew that Dan must have had a very good and very specific reason to tell Timo when he did, presumably related to his vague “he’s the only one who can help us” comment, but nothing could excuse the way he had gone about doing it. She could only imagine that Clark’s anger was similar to her own, even though he hadn’t been the one left in the firing line aboard Timo’s private jet when Dan handed over his handwritten note and ran away before its impact was felt.
Emma’s phone told her that Dan had tried to call twice, no doubt with a too-little-too-late apology at the ready, but her decision to remove him from the virtual receptionist’s all-hours whitelist ensured that he would have to hold onto it until she was back in Birchwood.
Both her focus and Timo’s had repeatedly been tempted to drift elsewhere throughout the evening, but Emma knew that anything other than full concentration on the next day’s showdown with two of the slickest and slimiest men in politics — William Godfrey and Jack Neal — could only end one way.
For now, they were the focus.
For now, Dan and Tara could wait.
C minus 55
McCarthy Residence
Birchwood, Colorado
Dan’s feet were too cold to feel any of the stones and twigs he’d stood on during his long walk home from Stevenson Farm, and all he wanted to do was get inside and warm them up in the bath.
If anyone had seen him on his way to the cornfield, his daze-like demeanour would have doubtless led them to think he was sleepwalking — just as Emma and Clark had naturally assumed when he first entered the same kind of trance-like state a year earlier. On his way back from the cornfield, Dan’s full consciousness enabled him to all but eliminate the chance that anyone would see him now by staying away from the main road.
And despite his numb feet and the awkward run-in with Richard Walker, Dan walked the long way home with a smile on his face.
At last, he absolutely positively knew that the Messengers were close. And more than that, he absolutely positively knew that they weren’t finished with him. As soon as he got home and could feel his feet again, he’d have some game-changing new leads to follow; star maps and moon phases would be his first ports of call in his bid to make sense of the triangle in the sky.
Although there was a long way to go before everything was clear, Dan already felt like his faith and confidence in the Messengers had been vindicated. Kerguelen was an attention-grabbing message to the world — there was no denying that. But this personal call to a fresh crop circle in the familiar cornfield where it all began, and more importantly the vivid if un-straightforward message that followed, had been delivered solely to Dan.
Whatever understandable doubts Clark and Emma might have had and whatever unanswered questions were rattling through Dan’s own mind, he now knew this much: the Messengers were talking to him… absolutely positively.
But as Dan entered the final and shortest stage of his journey, approaching his house slowly and with great care to be quiet and avoid activating any security lights, a slow but bright flash caught his eyes. It was coming from next door.
“Dan McCarthy,” a chirpy voice called.
He looked over and saw Tara standing at Emma’s front door, slowly covering and uncovering her phone’s flashlight. She put the phone in her pocket and took a few steps towards him. “You know, Dan, I wouldn’t keep catching you sneaking around in the middle of the night like this if you didn’t keep sneaking around in the middle of the night like this.”
“I wasn’t sneaking,” he said.
“Seriously, though, where have you been? I checked the cameras when I woke up an hour ago, because I’m not used to being on my own like this and I don’t exactly like living in an empty house with a dirt path and creepy woods right behind it. The cameras had picked up a few incidents; there was one of your dad getting home from the bar about an hour ago, and before that there was another one triggered by you… walking back there, by yourself. Then I tried calling you, but you weren’t picking up your phone.”
“It’s inside,” Dan said, relieved that his home’s security console was now located in the basement rather than the kitchen and hence that Henry wouldn’t be alerted to any suspicious incidents like Tara had been. There was no doubt that Henry would be sleeping by now, a full hour after getting home so late, so Dan felt extremely lucky that the timing had worked out fortuitously enough to ensure that their paths didn’t cross.
“Why would you go out without your phone? Do you even have a flashlight?”
The darkness and his empty hands answered for him, leaving Dan stumped as to what he could say to get out of this. “I just needed some air,” he eventually said.
Tara pointed to his house. “What’s wrong with your back door? Or your front door?”
“I just needed some thinking space.”
“It’s no quieter back there than it is in your back yard.”
“I needed thinking space,” Dan said, “not just quiet.”
“What were you thinking about… all the Kerguelen stuff, or personal stuff? The thing with Emma last night?”
“There’s a lot going on at once,” he replied noncommittally. “I just needed a break and right now I feel like I just need some sleep, so I’m going to go to bed. I’ll see you later.”
“Well I’m here whenever you need to talk, okay?” Tara said, sounding very genuine and perhaps slightly concerned. As with the last time Dan had spoken to her late at night, her natural accent was quite noticeable and sounded very much like Emma’s, if a little higher pitched. “I guess I’ll see you tomorrow?”
“Maybe,” Dan said. He then stepped towards his door as soon as Tara returned inside. His first step — just one more step — was enough to engage the security light above the door. Illuminated by the bright lamp, Dan glanced down at his bare feet and the various dirt-marks the cornfield had left on his trouser legs. If he had taken this single extra step either just before or just after Tara announced her presence, she would have seen it all and asked questions too difficult to dodge. The field of view of Emma’s side-facing security camera didn’t quite reach this far, and that only made the lucky escape even more fortunate.
That was close, Dan thought as he headed inside to warm himself up and reflect on an incredible few hours. Too close.
