“We can’t stay here after this,” Dan said, “but after what just happened I’d rather get Timo’s staff to arrange a flight with a pilot I trust. Thanks all the same.”
“Very well. Thank you, Dan, and please know that I’m sorry for all of this. Before you go, could you pass me over to Emma for a second?”
Dan handed the phone to Emma and gazed at the wall in a fuzzy kind of overwhelmed relief. He had gotten the message across to the person who needed to hear it most, but he would never get used to the fact that he was in a position to be conversing directly with President Slater. He didn’t like her — he couldn’t like someone who had ordered a raid on his home during his last stay in Italy — but in recent times he had come to dislike her a lot less than was once the case.
And Slater’s tone, one of something like fearful gratitude, added a very human element to a woman whose position often made her seem untouchably detached from the real world of feelings and vulnerability. Her final direct apology, the ‘I’m sorry’ rather than the previous dancing-around-the-words attempts to express regret for the actions of others, hit Dan particularly hard. He was never going to not tell Slater that her life was in danger, but he now felt a surprisingly warm gladness that he had.
“Of course he understands that,” Emma spoke into the phone, rolling her eyes as Dan watched on. “Yep… okay… obviously. So you’ll let us know what happens with the sweep of the hotel and you’ll definitely make sure none of these ground agents bother us again? Uh-huh? Good. Well, just stay safe, okay? The last thing the world needs right now is something happening to you.”
Emma walked to the door and opened it, handing the phone to Frank before closing it again and returning to Dan.
“What was the part about me understanding something?” he asked.
“She just wanted to make sure we know that this has to stay quiet. For now, all of it; even the fact that the Messengers are close. At least until tomorrow passes without any trouble, that has to stay between us. And the part about the planned hostage-taking… I think that one’s going to be a forever kind of secret, okay?”
“I’ve kept bigger secrets than that,” Dan said, grinning slightly despite the gravity of the topic.
Frank burst back into the room a few seconds later, evidently frustrated at having been kept out of the loop but with no choice but to obey a direct order from his commander-in-chief. “I’ll take you back to Fiore’s place,” he sighed.
“Sure thing,” Dan said.
Frank held the door open as they exited the room. “Am I ever going to find out what the Messengers told you tonight, or is this the kind of thing I should hope to never hear about again?”
“The second one,” Emma said.
Frank glanced between them, as though seeking a second opinion.
“What she said,” Dan confirmed. “On this one, no news is good news.”
FRIDAY
V minus 90
Private Jet
Milan to Denver
More than anger, more than resentment, and more than indignation, the overwhelming emotion in Dan McCarthy’s mind was relief. Having watched Emma being roughly dragged away by a then-mysterious stranger just hours earlier, he counted his lucky stars as he now watched her sleeping soundly in Timo Fiore’s private jet.
They had flown this exact route once before, with Clark, immediately after the sphere had been found off Miramar to seal the deal for a hoax Dan had fallen for and inadvertently sold to the rest of the world. The lie had long since come true, what with Dan ultimately admitting he had been duped by Richard Walker but later being contacted by the real Messengers. Best of all, those real Messengers’ well-timed public arrival on Contact Day had gone on to convince the world beyond any doubt that he was telling the truth and had never deliberately misled anyone.
It all felt so long ago… or at least it had. Until his dream-like vision of President Slater being taken hostage, thoughts of Kerguelen and Miramar and Lolo were beginning to feel like distant memories. There was the hostile attention from idiotic GeoSovs and the far more common adoration from everyone else, but in Dan’s internal and domestic lives, at least, things had been returning to something approaching normality.
But the vision changed everything; and even though the resultant run-in with shadowy federal agents left a sour taste in Dan’s mouth, that vision was all he could think about. That the GeoSovs would try something on the Contact Day anniversary came as no surprise, particularly when Godfrey had opted to formally launch the Global Contact Commission on that very day. Dan didn’t want President Slater to get hurt — out of basic human compassion as well as a rational fear of the chaos that would follow the worst-case scenario of her political assassination — and he was relieved to have been able to warn her in time.
What he was even more relieved by, however, was that the Messengers had been able to warn him in time. His fears over the continued viability of whatever it was in his neck that made him receptive to the Messengers’ interventions had been eased, despite his concerns over the invasiveness of his monthly medical tests having been proven well-founded with the revelation that government doctors had indeed planted a chip of their own under his skin.
Along with Dan’s relief that the Messengers had managed to contact him sat the perhaps even greater relief that they had wanted to. They were still keeping an eye on Earth, quite clearly, and were still willing to intervene when the likely consequences of not doing so were deemed sufficiently destabilising. In human political terms it didn’t get much more destabilising than the potential assassination of a sitting US President, and the timing would have amplified things even further.
A huge part of Dan wanted to see the Messengers again and ask them the million questions that still filled his mind, but the rational part of his brain reminded him that any such meeting would only come as a result of a necessary intervention; and since any earthly development that might provoke another intervention would likely be anything but positive, he considered it unwise to wish too hard that he would see his extraterrestrial friends in the flesh again anytime soon.
A phone call came in from Clark well into the flight, so much later than expected that Dan initially didn’t understand why he sounded so concerned. As soon as Clark mentioned the emergency tracker showing Dan’s location at the time of its activation as a military complex in Milan, the memory came back.
Dan downplayed the issue for now; Clark would hear everything, of course, but there was no sense in angering him with it yet. An equal consideration in Dan’s mind was that this had to stay quiet for the sake of national security and international stability, and that the validity of these kinds of abstract reasons wouldn’t be as easy to impress upon Clark over the phone as they would be in person.
When Clark asked what the hell Dan had been doing at a military complex in the middle of the night, all Dan could do was say it was a long story he would tell when he got home but that there was nothing to worry about in the meantime. He likewise explained that the decision to come home early hadn’t been made because of any major problem, but because of something that was happening in Buenos Aires that he didn’t want to talk about right now.
When Clark pushed for details, Dan changed the subject by lamenting how useless Clark would have been if there had been something to worry about, since it had taken him several hours to look at his damn phone and see the emergency location update.
Dan ended the call by asking how Tara was, knowing she’d been going through a rough time but having been out of touch with the world for several days. Clark said she was sound asleep at home and doing fine; he neglected to mention that he was there too, watching late-night TV on the couch while she slept in the bedroom.
Keeping the full story from Clark — for now — brought into Dan’s focus the broader point that the whole episode would be kept quiet by the countless people who were going to need to know about it. Frank Livingston and his young colleagues in Italy already knew about the contact e
vent, while all of the security staff involved in the full sweep at the Buenos Aires Gravesen would clearly have to know what they were looking for, if not necessarily why.
The news of a foiled hostage-taking plot against President Slater was never going to see the light of day for obvious reasons, however, much less the news of direct alien involvement in its foiling.
Dan, contemplative in his high-altitude solitude while Emma caught up on some sleep, considered that this point confirmed his old deeply held belief once and for all: the government really could have covered up alien contact or visitation, had they found out about it before he broke the story.
After all, he thought, that’s exactly what they’re doing now!
V minus 89
Ford Residence
Birchwood, Colorado
“You okay?” Clark groaned, yawning halfway to life after being roused by Tara opening and closing doors. He looked across the living room and saw her leaving the kitchen with a ludicrously over-filled glass of red wine.
“Just thirsty,” she said, a slight but somehow uncertain grin on her face.
At least she was drinking it from a glass rather than the bottle, Clark thought to himself, and she wasn’t trying to hide it. Despite these rationalisations, though, when taken alongside everything else he’d seen in recent days this was still far from a soothing sight.
“You gonna tell on me?” Tara asked, as though trying to mask a serious question with a mocking tone.
“Just try to get some sleep, okay?”
“I remember when you were fun, you know.”
Sitting up straight, Clark pointed at her as she carried the glass into her bedroom. “If you can look in a mirror and tell yourself that’s fun, we’ve got less in common than I thought.”
Tara turned away and re-entered her bedroom, slamming the door behind her.
Clark shook his head at the ceiling and tried to get comfortable again.
Emma and Dan couldn’t get home soon enough.
V minus 88
Private Jet
Milan to Denver
Sleep would come to Dan eventually — this was an inevitability during a long flight which followed a night as restless as the one he’d just endured — but not before he caught the last few minutes of a special ACN report on William Godfrey’s imminent return to a position of unmatched political power.
The resolute Englishman, former Chairman of both the Global Shield Commission and Global Space Commission, was unquestionably the greatest political survivor since the late Richard Walker. Just like Walker had repurposed his Interspace Defense Agency to keep up with changing times, Godfrey had succeeded in repurposing himself as the obvious candidate for a leadership role in three successive supranational organisations.
The Global Contact Commission, in one sense, was smaller than its predecessors. It was certainly true that a significant portion of the world had aligned with the China-led Earth Liaison Forum rather than the predominantly Western GCC, and Godfrey made no attempt to pretend otherwise. In another sense, however, this element of competition made his role at the GCC the most important of his life. For just like a country, a planet could have no more than one true leader. Godfrey considered it his calling to represent Earth in any future contact scenarios, and he had never before been more determined to win a bloodless war than he was to win his stand-off with Beijing.
Emboldened by the economic, military and cultural strength of his GCC’s unwavering core members in the shape of the United States, United Kingdom, European Union and Japan, William Godfrey would stop at nothing to see the ELF fall and Ding Ziyang come crawling for a seat at the GCC’s table in Buenos Aires.
The special report closed with a replay of a speech Godfrey had made mere months earlier while contesting a leadership election with his arch rival Diane Logan, prior to the idea of the GCC first being floated and back when his immediate focus was regaining his position as Prime Minister after the GSC’s collapse. Godfrey won that particular contest at a canter, surprising no one given the gravitas that came with his worldwide prominence in recent years, but it had since been claimed that he knew he would be quitting almost as soon as he stepped back inside Number Ten.
He had known about the international plans for the GCC and had known he would be asked to lead it, this highly plausible theory held, and his participation in the leadership election was a message to the wings of his party who remained loyal to Logan or, even worse, to the risible John Cole.
Cole, Godfrey’s handpicked successor when he first stepped down as PM to lead the Global Shield Commission, had resigned in disgrace following uproar at his self-serving decision to leak news of Il Diavolo’s collision course with Earth. His hand had been forced by Godfrey’s calculated decision to expel his own nation from the rechristened Global Space Commission; few survived making it onto Godfrey’s bad side, and Cole’s political career appeared to be completely over. The last Godfrey had heard, he was somewhere in Africa or the Middle East using the weight of his former office to cash-in on the desperation of political and business leaders seeking to add an air of Western legitimacy to whatever projects needed it most.
Dan hadn’t previously seen or heard anything about the supposedly famous Godfrey speech that was about to air — he did his best to stay away from politics, year round — so he thought he might as well pay full attention given that he had nothing else to do and his mind was already firmly back on the GCC-ELF stand-off. If this speech was as relevant to current events as the introduction suggested, it was sure to be interesting.
The speech, given in the House of Commons, began with Godfrey launching a seemingly petty attack on his rival for wearing workmen’s clothes during a recent photo op at a building site. Plenty of other British politicians had frequently done similar things in the past and most saw it as a transparent but essential effort to present an ‘all in this together’ kind of message.
On this occasion, however, Godfrey had pulled no punches in his own evaluation of the incident.
“The men and women on that building site are from a completely different world than Diane Logan,” he began, “and they know that better than anyone. Diane was born into opportunity utterly alien to those workers, as was I, and she would do well to stop patronising the hard-working people of our country by pretending otherwise. The difference between Diane and myself is that I will look a citizen in the eye and stand before him as I am — with no apologies and no pretence. When I do so I will dress appropriately for a man of my position, because I was born with certain opportunities and intellectual propensities which imbued upon me the ability to serve this great country as its leader. Diane Logan may have the ability to stand before an honest working man and lie to his face about her being a woman of the people, but I have neither that ability nor a desire to possess it. For I am not a man of the people, I am a servant of the people. I am the man for the people. I was without question born to be the leader of the people — and I make no apologies for stating that fact!”
Much of the House roared in support.
“This leadership contest is a distracting formality that our party and far more importantly our country could do without,” Godfrey continued. “My Honourable and Right Honourable friends, the matter comes down to this: I was born to lead, and lead I shall.”
Godfrey’s closing sentence was an instant soundbite. Although seized upon by his opponents as a sign of his detachment and an implication that he believed others were born to slave away beneath him within the confines of an inescapable class structure, the comment went down well in the polls.
The host of the special ACN report interjected at this point to state that many now believed Godfrey had made his ‘born to lead’ speech full in the knowledge that he would be back in Buenos Aires before long to build the GCC from the GSC’s ashes. Dan’s tired mind, having missed this point until it was explicitly spelled out, agreed that this was just the kind of thing Godfrey would do; love him or hate him, few could deny that Wil
liam Godfrey was a grandmaster of political chess in a world where most of his opponents were still learning which pieces could move where.
The very end of the ACN piece showed Godfrey dealing with the single most common question he faced during his effortless leadership victory over Diane Logan: the question of how he could be trusted to lead the country when it was now known that during his time at the GSC, he had actively suppressed data supporting the notion that the Kerguelen bolide event of a year earlier had been alien in nature.
“From time to time, it is in the interests of the public for certain things to be kept quiet while solutions can be sought,” he said, addressing the strongly worded question which came from Logan herself. “If you’ll forgive my tone, Diane, do you understand what leadership actually entails? Difficult decisions and a weight of responsibility come with the territory you’re trying to conquer here, and heavy is the head that wears the crown. Some have leadership thrust upon them, such as my good friend Dan McCarthy. Tell me: was Dan wrong to keep from us what he did? Was Dan wrong to maintain our belief in a hoax perpetrated by Richard Walker and benevolently maintained by our friendly visitors from afar with their delivery of the third and fourth plaques? Of course he wasn’t, as all right-minded people already understand completely.
“And on the other side of the line,” Godfrey went on, “what of our former colleague Mr Cole, the man who vacated the position we’re competing for after disgracing himself and the United Kingdom by revealing news of Il Diavolo’s trajectory — something else which was being kept quiet for very good reasons of public order? Tell us, Diane: in your black and white world, are we to understand that Dan McCarthy is the villain and John Cole the hero?”
The Final Call Page 5