“I guess I’m not opposed,” she said, clearly not too enthused, either. The day when Dan and Phil had ripped the shielding from the walls of Dan’s basement had been symbolic of his post-Contact Day freedom from a time of secrets and pressure, and it saddened Emma that such freedom seemed to be a thing of the past. “But Dan, if you’re worried about them listening in, I think that other thing is probably the main thing to worry about right now…”
Dan instinctively put a hand to the back of his neck. Sensing everyone else’s confusion, he then dived right into an explanation. “The government or some secret agency put a chip in my neck,” he said. “I didn’t know, but it detected the pain I felt on Friday night when the Messengers contacted me. By the time I woke up, and that couldn’t have even been a full minute after it started, there were agents standing in the bedroom. They grabbed me, grabbed Emma, and took us away for individual questioning. I’ve been under close surveillance all year — and if they can get to me that quickly in Italy, you can be damn sure they’ve been hanging around here a lot closer than we ever could have thought.”
“Jesus,” Henry groaned. Like most of the others, he wore an expression of shock.
Clark’s, however, was a look of full-on rage. Godfrey had naturally only told the GCC representatives of the contact event and nothing about the forceful detention, so this particular part of the story hadn’t reached Birchwood via Timo. “They took you away?” he asked, fury in the words. “So that’s why your emergency tracker said you activated it at the military complex in Milan, when you told me that was nothing to worry about?”
“Well it wasn’t the main thing to worry about!” Dan replied, sounding slightly defensive. “It’s not the most important part.”
Clark breathed very slowly. “Did they hurt you?”
“Not on purpose,” Dan said, choosing his words carefully. “They grabbed me and I saw one of them sneaking up on Emma; she was outside with her headphones on. I fought two of them off for long enough to run out of the bedroom, but another one tackled me from the side and my head hit the floor pretty hard. It knocked me unconscious, but sort of slowly… I didn’t just black out straight away. I guess the guy who tackled me was holding me down pretty hard; I couldn’t breathe easily.”
“Did he speak? Did you get his name? Any birthmarks, tattoos… give me something to—”
“Clark, it’s done,” Dan said, cutting off the thought of natural justice that so often seemed to be where Clark’s mind went whenever he became aware that someone he cared about had been mistreated.
“Anyway…” Emma interjected. “That’s the thing about surveillance and security and everything else… I’m not so sure they really have been watching and listening to us all year, in terms of actual eavesdropping. Because we’ve all talked about a lot of stuff in the past year… all kinds of ideas and theories. All kinds of little things they didn’t know about, but which they definitely would have wanted to know more about if they’d heard us mention them at all. Do you know what I mean?”
No one said they didn’t.
“But about these chips in our necks,” she went on. “I have one too, but do you think there’s really any way they could hear us… through the skin? I would say no, and from their perspective I can see why it makes sense for them to have something in there to alert them if we ever feel sudden pain — contact pain — so I don’t see any reason to doubt that was their sole purpose. I understand why they’d want one in Dan’s neck more than why they’d want one in mine, but I guess they wanted to be thorough.”
“And we’re getting them removed soon,” Dan clarified. “Slater said so, and she doesn’t gain anything from lying to me when all a lie would do is make me angry. She doesn’t want anyone to know what they did to me and she knows I’ll talk if they piss me off any more than they already have.”
Clark grunted out an uncertain reaction. “I dunno, man, she might know how set you are on staying out of the spotlight. Especially if they have been watching and listening in all this time, but even if they haven’t… the only public comments you’ve made in the past year have all been about you feeling like you’ve done your part and wanting to leave everything else to the elected leaders.”
Mr Byrd waved his hand slowly, half-raising it like a school child. “So for those of us who missed the start… you were contacted on Friday and the government knew straight away? That’s all we know for sure?”
“That’s part of it,” Dan said. “I had a vision of the Buenos Aires Gravesen, in a dream, and a policeman in the dream told me someone was inside and had just taken President Slater hostage. The Japanese Prime Minister, too, and my watch in the dream said it was Saturday morning at 11. I saw a GeoSov flag hanging from a window on the top floor. Then in real life, when I spoke to Slater, she said she wasn’t staying at the Gravesen but was scheduled to meet him there at that time. And the security services found a GeoSov flag in the exact room whose window I saw it hanging from, so Slater and Godfrey and everyone else know it wasn’t a false alarm.”
“And that’s all we know for sure,” Emma confirmed.
Dan gulped. “Well…”
Emma’s brow furrowed. “Well?”
“I didn’t want to tell you this next part while the guards at the airport were definitely watching and listening to us, because I’m still trying to make sense of it. And I didn’t want to tell you in the car because I didn’t want to tell Clark before Tara or my dad. I don’t want any more secrets or some people knowing more than others. I don’t want any of this, but I definitely don’t want that.”
She nodded in understanding.
“Oh, and just quickly on that,” Dan said. “Clark, remember the guy who took us to the facility on Contact Day? I know his full name and I told the agents, when I was trying to make sure they knew not to mess with me. I know the facility, too. I mapped his movements with a tracking device, but I didn’t tell them that. They don’t know how I know, and they might even think the Messengers told me. Anyway, the secret base is out at Heron Lake reservoir and it’s completely underground. You know how Billy Kendrick always said it’s easier to hide something underground than restrict a huge sector of airspace, especially if you want the very existence of the place to be secret? It’s exactly that… the old idea of being able to hide the fact that there’s a secret, not just hiding the secret itself.”
“Okay, man,” Clark said. “That wasn’t smart but it’s not exactly the most important thing right now, is it? What’s the next part that even Emma doesn’t know.”
Dan spat it out: “I know how much this Zanzibar triangle looks like an obvious hoax, but I think it’s real. There was a shape on the flag I saw in my dream, like white dots in the corner of the flag making a kind of constellation shape. It wasn’t a constellation, I just mean that kind of thing like you see on an Australian flag or whatever. Anyway, that exact shape is pretty clearly visible in the blurry photos we’ve seen of the triangle. You know those little jewels on it? All the brightest ones that reflect the most light are arranged in the same shape as the arrangement I saw on the flag. In the dream, I think the Messengers were telling me they were going to plant it.”
“Why?” Emma asked, one word summing up everyone’s feelings.
“I’m just going to admit that I flat-out don’t know,” Dan said. “And I don’t know why I don’t know. I don’t know why they’re being so cryptic again. Last year it was because they wanted to guide me to the fourth plaque with enough provenance to make the discovery seem plausible without exposing Walker’s hoax, because they didn’t want to destabilise Earth anymore than they had to. But now? Everyone already knows they’re real. Everyone saw them a mile down the street, standing at the drive-in with a cable connected to my neck and a forcefield holding everyone else back. I don’t get it.”
“Well, it’s a triangle,” Tara chimed in. “And we know they like triangles. The first vision you had last year was a triangle in the sky and then it was a triangular shape betwe
en the main locations of other stuff that led us to Salida. Remember? What Trey saw at Lolo, the California Fireball, and then Salida. So a triangle does fit in with everything else, is all I’m saying. At least we know that much.”
“Hmm, but so does everyone else,” Timo Fiore mused, breaking a long and thoughtful silence. “If someone wanted to hoax an artefact, it would probably look like this. With the timing and location so neatly benefiting the ELF, I can’t see past the idea of a hoax… either by the ELF themselves or maybe even by the GeoSovs.”
“The GeoSovs?” Dan asked, clearly having not even considered this.
Timo shrugged. “Think about it… maybe the Messengers were telling you there was going to be a GeoSov hoax? You saw this constellation-like arrangement in the same dream that told you the GeoSovs were going to try to take Slater hostage, correct? It therefore makes a degree of sense that the constellation was there to warn you that the GeoSovs were going to do this, too. Think back to the IDA hoax: Walker set everything up to fit in with the idea that the Nazis dumped that sphere off Miramar. Maybe the GeoSovs are setting everything up to make it look like the ELF dumped this triangle?”
Dan rubbed his eyes in exasperation, not in disagreement at Timo’s well-argued point but purely at his own frustrated confusion. The last thing he thought he’d be thinking about once again was whether something was a hoax or a genuinely extraterrestrial find. All over again, he felt sick to the pit of his stomach.
Emma lifted her phone from her pocket and groaned, interrupting a conversation no one was enjoying. Like Dan, she hated Timo’s suggestion but reluctantly recognised that it might just be valid. “Focus 20/20,” she said. “It’s tonight — a Saturday special — and they want you on via satellite.”
“Me?” Dan asked. He walked around to look at the list of names on her phone. All were written underneath a politely worded invitation from the desk of the show’s much-respected host, Marian de Clerk.
First came Billy Kendrick, a good friend of Dan’s and a reasonable man. Next was Joe Crabbe, the one-time shock-jock who was now seen as a more balanced media personality. Thirdly, and certainly most surprisingly, was an unnamed ‘GeoSov spokesperson’.
Fourth was Kaitlyn Judd, the famous actress who had already appeared alongside Dan on the show on one previous occasion. People now associated her with aliens, especially due to her starring role in the critically panned movie The Fourth Plaque, which had almost ended her career when the final cut ended up being little more than a propaganda piece for William Godfrey’s now-defunct Global Space Commission. Most recently she’d starred in a far more successful movie dramatising the approach and eventual deflection of Comet Conte-Abate, titled simply Il Diavolo.
Officially, Kaitlyn had been booked to talk about that movie’s home media release; she had asked some good questions on her previous appearances, though, and clearly knew what she was talking about. There was no way Dan was participating, but he looked forward to hearing what she had to say as well as how Billy Kendrick and Joe Crabbe would deal with a GeoSov.
It also mentioned that a final guest would be appearing via satellite, and that this was not a reference to Dan who could round the panel out to six if he wished.
“Not a chance in hell,” he said, exactly as Emma expected. “I don’t even know what’s going on, and I’m staying out of the spotlight, anyway.”
“Quite right,” Clark said, nodding firmly.
Emma nodded too, though far less committally.
“Shutting down a GeoSov once and for all?” Timo said, bucking the trend. “It’s enticing, Dan. And we have many hours to prepare…”
“Timo,” Dan sighed, “I wouldn’t do this if the Messengers themselves came down and asked me to.”
V minus 76
Ikulu
Dar es Salaam, Tanzania
Some fifty miles south-west of the Sunrise Palace Resort where the Zanzibar triangle had been discovered, a starlit scene few could have ever imagined greeted the media personnel lucky enough to have been invited. Four men stood behind a wide podium at Ikulu, the State House and official residence of Tanzania’s President.
He was there, proud as could be, as was the triangle’s discoverer, Hassan Manula, who looked distinctly like he would rather be anywhere else in the world.
Two men more familiar to an international audience stood in the centre. The first was Ding Ziyang, just off the plane having made a beeline for Tanzania when news of the incredible find first broke. Ding’s initial reaction had been one of scepticism, and this lay behind the public silence he had maintained so far.
As the inaugural President of the Earth Liaison Forum as well as the world’s most populous superpower’s head of state, Ding had a strong claim for the position of most powerful man in the world. And given what he had been told about the Zanzibar triangle after a full day of careful analysis, he had a strong feeling that the discovery of the object — now at a secure location further inland — would cement his position and perhaps even remove any doubt.
Ding’s presence was a welcome surprise to the attendant press, but it had never felt out of the question. What caught everyone off-guard was the identity of the man standing at Ding’s right-hand side: John Cole, the former British Prime Minister who had been forced to resign in disgrace after deciding to unilaterally reveal to the public that Earth was in the path of an extinction-level comet.
Now, Cole’s brand was utterly toxic in the United Kingdom, long abandoned and disowned by even his closest former allies. A greater cause of anger than the irresponsible comet revelation itself had been its deceitful nature, a transparent ‘accident’, as well as the fact that it was evidently driven by self-interest and a grudge against then-GSC Chairman William Godfrey.
In the intervening time, Cole had been working as a spuriously defined ‘development consultant’, primarily in African and Asian states where his notoriety as the recent leader of such a powerful Western country counted for enough to cancel out the utter contempt in which he was now held at home.
Many eyes stayed on Cole while the others addressed the media, beginning with the Tanzanian President who spoke of his pride that the Messengers had chosen to bless his nation with the triangle. Unaccustomed to the global spotlight but tremendously glad to be in it, he also personally thanked Hassan Manula for putting his country before himself in alerting the authorities as soon as he discovered it.
Hassan, feeling tremendously out of place and visibly sweating buckets, rushed through the speech that had been written for him. He said that he felt blessed on an even deeper level since he had been the one lucky enough to first set eyes on the incredible object, and really did as well as anyone could have expected in delivering the pre-written words in a plausibly natural manner.
Speaking Chinese despite his well-known mastery of English, Ding Ziyang wasted no time in stressing the importance of the Zanzibar discovery. He described the triangle as the most beautiful thing he had ever seen and the most incredible gift in human history. Much as the two earlier speakers had expressed their gratitude that the triangle showed up in their country, Ding took great delight in expressing his own joy that it had arrived within the borders of a staunch ELF member like Tanzania. Details of what his expert analysts had determined while studying the object would be released in due course, he promised, and until then he begged for patience from the citizens of GCC nations who might understandably feel left out of an incredible moment in humanity’s history.
In two short sentences, Ding Ziyang then greatly turned up the heat on Chairman Godfrey by encouraging such disenfranchised citizens to make their feelings known to their national leaders in any way they deemed appropriate, and by encouraging those national leaders to switch allegiance to the ELF now while the offer stood.
“Because as we can see from where they put the triangle,” Ding concluded, surprising everyone with an impromptu and highly symbolic switch to fluent but heavily accented English, “the Messengers have just made their a
llegiance perfectly clear.”
John Cole, pushing out his burly chest to a near comical extent, cleared his throat and leaned forward slightly into the microphone in front of him. “I’d like to echo President Ding’s words,” Cole said, using a title no one else ever had. The Englishman spoke in his northern accent of old, jettisoning the more ‘proper’ speech patterns that had been coached into him by his former confidante and partner in crime, Jack Neal. “It says a lot about the President that he’s been kind enough and forgiving enough to extend the hand of friendship to those who have so far been bullied or bribed into participating in Godfrey and Slater’s Argentine charade, and I dearly hope the offer is seized by many while it stands.”
Just as when Cole had once stood at Godfrey’s side during the political free-for-all that followed the IDA leak, making controversial points his boss wanted to get across without actually saying himself, it didn’t take a political genius to know that Cole was once again being used in this way. His new master, Ding Ziyang, now stood quietly while Cole delivered controversial soundbites whose origin allowed a degree of plausible deniability, if necessary, that he had overstepped the mark of his own accord rather than as per any orders from above.
“I stand here before you delighted to announce the President’s intention to initiate a rapid proliferation of ELF satellite offices in strategic locations,” Cole went on, booming out the words as though addressing a packed arena with no microphone, “the first of which will open on the beautiful island of Cuba in a matter of days. I myself am greatly honoured to have been chosen as the ELF’s new Western Secretary, and I look forward to taking up my residence in Havana.
“I’ve been here in the ELF’s African heartland handling some unrelated business for over a week, and the fact that the Messengers placed their latest message of peace in this particular chunk of the ELF’s vast territory makes the timing very good from my personal standpoint. I’ve already seen the desperate conspiracy theories and claims of hoaxes but really, this is one story that not even Richard Walker could have made up! I’ll be here for the rest of today and tomorrow, keeping a close eye on what else our brainbox scientists can find out about the triangle, but none of that is going to stop me from appearing via satellite on tonight’s live episode of Focus 20/20. And needless to say, I very much look forward to sharing my views on these exciting recent developments with Marian de Clerk and my fellow panellists. Until then, friends…”
The Final Call Page 10