Not Alone
Craig A. Falconer
Not Alone
© 2015 Craig A. Falconer
This edition published December 2015
All rights reserved by the author.
The characters and events herein are entirely fictional. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental. Some of the locations found in this book are also fictional while others have been liberally adapted.
Reader's note: Not Alone was written, edited and produced in Scotland. As such, some spellings will differ from those found in the United States. Examples of British English include using colour rather than color, organise rather than organize, and centre rather then center. An exception to this rule is the use of proper nouns, which retain their American spelling where applicable.
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Part 1
The Leak
“There are risks and costs to action.
But they are far less than the long range risks
of comfortable inaction.”
John F. Kennedy
FRIDAY
D minus 99
Winchester Street
Colorado Springs, Colorado
Dan McCarthy’s delivery route proved straightforward enough thanks to Winchester Street’s proximity to the IDA building. The building wasn’t particularly big, but it was a local landmark which Dan vividly remembered visiting on a school trip.
For Dan, obsessed with space since before he could remember, this trip to the IDA had been a dream come true even though he had been old enough at 13 to accept that he didn’t have the aptitude for a career as an astronaut or even to fill any of the agency’s less glamorous positions.
Eight years later, Dan’s “career” amounted to serving fancy coffee to rich teenagers. And now, apparently, it also involved delivering rare books to people too lazy to drive four miles to the store. With the ever-rising cost of fuel having recently forced Dan to ditch his car for the journey to work, he hoped this first delivery would also be his last.
As Dan mentally relived his day at the IDA, the journey to Winchester Street flew by. The one memory that stood head and shoulders above the rest in Dan’s mind was the moment he met Richard Walker. More than anything the imposing man had said, Dan remembered trying not to look at the scar. He remembered not being able to look away.
Dan knew the story. Everyone knew the story. Richard Walker was a titan of American politics who had endured as a highly public figure for twice as long as Dan had been alive, and the ancient scar was no small part of his legend.
A voice from Dan’s phone’s GPS app told him to turn left, which he dutifully did. Seconds later, a new and more piercing sound filled the air. The deafening alarm hit Dan’s ears suddenly and sharply enough for him to know that he hadn’t cycled into earshot but rather that the noise had just begun.
It didn’t sound like a car alarm. As Dan cycled closer and the volume kept rising, it didn’t sound like any alarm he had ever heard.
Every twenty seconds or so, the sound changed. When it first rose and fell like a slow ambulance siren, Dan pictured a blue flashing light. Next came a bellowing ar-ar-ar which sounded like the warning system at a nuclear power station; its light would be orange, Dan imagined.
The third sound was the worst: a rapid shrieking ee-ee-ee-ee-ee that Dan could only compare to the snow monkeys he once saw at the zoo, who had taken exception to an uninvited bird landing in their pool. Only instead of the ten agitated snow monkeys that Dan had watched in fascination, the alarm sounded like ten thousand. This would definitely be a strobe light.
Dan felt relief when the alarm looped back to the ambulance style oscillation, a gentle lullaby compared to the angry snow monkeys.
After another left turn, the IDA building came into view in the distance. There was no flashing light but the acoustics convinced Dan that the alarm was coming from there. If he was right, the streets would be crawling with police in minutes.
As Winchester Street drew near, Dan’s phone instructed him to turn right in 200 yards. Dan looked ahead. There was no right in 200 yards.
“Display alternative route,” Dan requested without slowing down, keen to get away from the alarm and whatever had caused it as quickly as possible.
“Turn right in 150 yards,” his phone said, sticking to its guns.
Dan pulled it out of his pocket and looked at the map. The phone had confused a driveway for a throughway, but fortunately there was a real right turn not too far ahead.
Dan looked back up just in time to see a jet-black figure dashing onto the street from between two parked cars.
“Move,” the man grunted.
Dan tried to turn his bike away but the man ran straight into the side of it, dropping everything in his hands and sending Dan crashing to the ground.
The man fell, too, but Dan cushioned his fall.
Through the intense pain of an impact that felt like it had scraped off half of the skin on his left side, Dan grabbed the man’s legs and tried to push the bike aside with his body.
The man kicked free and stood up, creating a distance between himself and Dan.
Dan saw beyond doubt that the man was a robber, dressed head to toe in black with leather gloves and a ski mask that had no holes at the nose or mouth. As the man stared back, all that Dan could see were two cut-out circles of white skin around two green eyes, beady and startled. No amount of leather and wool could hide the man’s fear.
After several seconds of tense eye contact, Dan’s gaze shifted to the man’s fallen loot. A tin the size of a shoebox had spilled open, revealing no fewer than six gold bars. Dan started to question whether the alarm really was coming from the IDA; this looked more like some kind of bank job.
Scattered on the other side of the man were four or five manilla folders. Dan’s eyes fell on the only one that had landed face up. He could just make out the block capitals on its square white label: V. SLATER.
Dan safely assumed that V. Slater stood for Valerie Slater, and that the stolen folder either belonged to President Slater or contained someone’s dossier on her. The IDA was making sense again.
The man saw Dan eyeing the folder. “You don’t want to die for that,” he grunted in the same gruff tone as before, clearly an attempt to mask his voice.
“What is it?” Dan asked, not knowing what else to say or do.
The man ignored the question and instead opened his coat, flashing the butt of a previously concealed weapon.
Dan almost fell over himself as he frantically lifted his bike, not even bothering to pick up his phone from the spot where it had landed after the collision.
“Don’t move,” the man said. Dan looked up and saw the man’s hand reaching for the gun.
Dan dropped the bike and showed his palms.
With one eye on Dan, the man hurriedly packed the six gold bars back into their tin and gathered up the manilla folders.
Dan stood stunned as the man ran off in the direction he had been headed. After watching him take a sharp left, Dan heard the man’s gruff voice shout “go, go, go!”
A door
then slammed shut and the unseen getaway car sped away.
Dan crouched down to pick up his phone to dial 911, but something else caught his eye: underneath a parked car on the other side of his bike from where the rest of the loot had fallen, Dan spotted a manilla folder.
What stuck in Dan’s mind was that the robber hadn’t seemed to care when Dan eyed the gold bars but instantly flashed a weapon when he asked about the Slater folder.
Did Dan really want to know what was inside this folder? Did he really want to risk involving himself in whatever was going on here?
He stood up and scanned the street. Police sirens now joined the alarm — currently in the orange-light ar-ar-ar stage of its cycle — but there was no one else on the narrow street where Dan now found himself.
He crouched down again.
And then, after a few seconds of indecision, Dan McCarthy put his phone in his pocket and reached for the folder.
D minus 98
IDA Headquarters
Colorado Springs, Colorado
Richard Walker stood in his ground floor office, staring ruefully at broken glass and scattered belongings.
The small safe built into his desk showed signs of forced entry as the thief’s borer and crowbar lay abandoned on the floor.
The two police officers on the scene told Richard that the culprit had almost certainly smashed the large glass window as a means of escape when the alarm was already sounding. Though they offered no specific suggestion of how the intruder might have got in, the words “inside job” were spoken.
“It had to be someone who knew I was in a meeting,” Richard agreed. He had a well-earned reputation for stoicism, but even his voice creaked slightly under the strain of what had happened.
“Can you tell us what this meeting was about?” one of the officers asked. His female colleague was taking notes.
“I don’t know if you watch much news,” Richard said, more than a hint of derision in his voice, “but I’ve had a lot on my plate this week.”
“I’m sure you have. Who else was in the meeting?”
“That’s none of your concern.”
The female officer who had been taking notes looked up. “Sir, we just need someone to corroborate where you were at the time of the—”
“Why?” Richard interrupted. “In case I stole my own gold and smashed my own window? Do you know who I am?”
“We know exactly who you are, sir, and no one is suggesting anything like that.”
Richard took a deep breath and sat down in his chair, right beside the safe that had failed him so completely. “Okay. It was just me and Ben.”
“Ben Gold?”
Richard nodded. “We were in his office from 8:35 until we heard the alarm at 10:05. Ask him yourself.”
The officer jotted this down.
“And other than the gold you mentioned,” her colleague said, “was there anything else of value in the safe?”
Richard shook his head slowly, almost distantly.
“Anything sensitive?”
“It was a personal safe,” Richard muttered.
“So no classified documents?”
Richard looked at the man without speaking.
“Mr Walker, if there were, we have to inform the—”
“It was a personal safe,” Richard repeated without emotion. “Why are you wasting time asking me all of these questions, anyway? Why aren’t you out there looking for the thief? Do you even have a description?”
The police officers hesitated for a few seconds before the man spoke. “The only sighting we have is from a driver who saw an individual fleeing on foot,” he said. “The witness described a male of medium height, medium build and unknown ethnicity.”
“So basically you’ve narrowed it down to a human male,” Richard said.
“We’re doing what we can, Mr Walker,” the man replied.
Richard stood up. Anger crossed his face. “Are you, though? Because I look outside and I don’t see any roadblocks. I listen to all of your nonsense and I don’t hear anything about a lockdown zone to contain the thief.”
The officer gulped. “Mr Walker, for a personal theft, our response has to be, with respect… proportionate. You’ve told us that no IDA files or classified documents were taken.”
“Documents can only be classified if the bureaucrats get their useless hands…” Richard stopped himself mid-sentence, deciding not to tell these incompetent public servants any more than he had to.
“Get their hands on them?” the woman asked.
“Never mind,” Richard said. He walked to his door and pushed it open. “You can see yourselves out. I’ve got some cleaning up to do.”
D minus 97
Winchester Street
Colorado Springs, Colorado
Dan lifted the manilla folder out from under the parked car and read the single word on its label: KERGUELEN.
Since the only other folder Dan saw had President Slater’s name on it, he assumed that Kerguelen was a foreign leader. He would search on his phone when it was safe to do so, but for now he tucked the folder into his backpack beside the undelivered book and cycled quickly to create distance between himself and the IDA building.
Dan was so caught up in the moment that he didn’t notice exactly when the alarm stopped, only realising that the world was quiet when he reached a junction and listened for traffic.
After a few minutes of cycling through the pain of his earlier fall, Dan stopped outside a posh-looking café when he thought he had gone far enough to be safe.
He typed into his phone’s search bar and immediately learned that Kerguelen was a place rather than a person.
More specifically, the island of Kerguelen was a grim rock that lay more than 2,000 miles from civilisation, somewhere between Antarctica and Madagascar.
A quick scan of the top few encyclopaedia entries informed Dan that the main island was the largest of a small group which in turn formed part of the Kerguelen Plateau, a sunken microcontinent which now lay a mile underwater.
After being initially underwhelmed, Dan felt his interest pique with this last revelation. What did a sunken landmass have to do with the IDA?
A thousand thoughts ran through Dan’s mind. Was it really possible that he might be holding in his hands suppressed evidence of an underwater discovery? If so, what kind of evidence?
Dan didn’t know the answer to that, but the IDA’s involvement gave him some clues as to what such a discovery might involve. The idea at the front of Dan’s mind could be best summarised by the two words that his brother Clark had long ago pleaded with him to stop bringing up in regular conversation: alien visitation.
Unlike his brother and most other people he knew, Dan openly believed in intelligent extraterrestrial life, stubbornly insisting that the absence of proof did not equate to proof of absence.
With the lure of positive proof now weighing heavy in his hands, Dan checked once more that no one was watching then carefully opened the folder.
His eyes skimmed the first page and froze, stunned.
In handwritten blue ink, someone at the IDA had concocted a plan to discredit Billy Kendrick, a once-esteemed archaeologist who now held and espoused some highly unorthodox views on extraterrestrials and the more general truth-suppressing effects of “institutional ostrichism” in academia.
In this handwritten plan to discredit Billy, a shortlist of brainstormed bullet points such as “financial irregularities?” and “infidelity?” were followed by the words “false dawn” and an arrow indicating to turn overleaf. Dan followed the instruction.
The other side of the paper contained two thorough false-flag schemes to “injure belief” in extraterrestrial life, both involving staged incidents intended to look real and create fervent interest before being explained away, thus making people less likely to believe next time around.
One idea was to create irregular lights in the sky — “to be seen by 10-20 credible & diverse individuals” — before sending a
supposedly decisive image of a UFO to Billy Kendrick to create more buzz. “Kendrick will no doubt lead calls for government comment,” the plan continued, “until another eyewitness releases their own video proving that the lights were something unequivocally innocuous. Kendrick is humbled and the public’s belief threshold is raised.”
Dan scanned the second scheme more quickly, seeing that it involved hiring a “respectable married couple in their mid forties” to talk plausibly about an alien encounter. All going well, the couple would capture the public’s attention and gain their trust only to eventually admit to making the whole thing up out of financial desperation.
There was a brief list of pros and cons for each plan, along with a scribbled idea to “flood the media with discoveries of old pressure spheres to preempt hysteria in the worst case scenario.”
Dan paused to consider the final line. What was the worst case scenario, and what did it have to do with pressure spheres? Impatient to find out, he opened the folder fully and lifted out the loose pages. There seemed to be around seven or eight.
A car quickly but quietly pulled up across the street from Dan. Startled, he lowered the folder and pretended to be busy on his phone. An elderly couple stepped out of the car and walked into the small café behind Dan, waving to the driver as they went. Dan breathed a sigh of relief but knew he had to be more careful.
Dan raised the folder again to put it safely in his backpack until he was somewhere more private, but the briefest of glances at the next page revealed something big: as well as actively spreading lies, the IDA really was trying to cover something up.
Not Alone Page 1