Dan flicked to the next again page, which looked similar in style to the last. In contrast to the interesting but underwhelming scribbles about Billy Kendrick, both of these pages were printed and potentially verifiable.
The two documents were genuine-looking letters from government agencies in Argentina and Austria, consisting of courteous replies to IDA requests to block underwater excavations at Mar del Plata and Lake Toplitz, respectively. Both were dated 1989.
Another car pulled up to drop someone off outside the café, and this time Dan put the folder straight into his backpack and started cycling.
Dan now had no doubt that he possessed evidence of a major government cover-up. Fearful of being either physically spotted or digitally surveilled, he wanted to do two things: get the folder off the street, and get to a computer that wasn’t his.
He gave his phone a command which could kill both birds with one stone: “Open map. Route to nearest library.”
“Northlight Public Library, 600 yards,” his phone replied.
“Route to alternative library,” Dan said. 600 yards was far too close.
“Baker Street Public Library, 2.6 miles.”
Dan took a sharp right turn and headed towards Baker Street, obediently following his phone’s verbal directions. The route took him away from the IDA building and in the general direction of his workplace, which was a bonus.
As Dan pushed himself to go faster, the pain on the left side of his body flared up again. Only the river of adrenaline coursing through his veins made it bearable, acting as a mild but welcome painkiller.
But with adrenaline came anxiety, and Dan imagined the eyes of every passing driver sizing him up and piercing his backpack with their gaze.
Dan tried to shake these thoughts aside.
It’s out of sight and safe for now, he told himself.
What he couldn’t shake so easily was the troubling probability that powerful people were already looking for the folder…
Powerful people who would stop at nothing to recover it.
D minus 96
Baker Street Public Library
Colorado Springs, Colorado
Dan reached Baker Street Public Library without any further incident and secured his bike to the otherwise empty railing.
When he opened the door, it sounded more like a playground than a library. The source of the ruckus was a class of schoolchildren. The noise wasn’t a problem in itself, but the class took up almost all of the library’s computers and wouldn’t give Dan the privacy he needed.
He walked to the reception desk, glad that he at least looked respectable in his work clothes, and asked the surprisingly young male librarian if there were any other computers.
“Only the chat booth,” the man said, “but that’s subject to a small charge. The kids will be leaving in a few minutes, anyway.”
Dan could afford to wait a few minutes for the sake of privacy, but he liked the sound of the chat booth. He asked about it.
The librarian explained that the chat booth was exactly what it sounded like: an enclosed booth designed for video chatting, primarily intended for members of the community without a computer and webcam of their own to conduct video interviews for jobs or college applications.
“How much is the charge?” Dan asked.
“Are you a member of the library?”
Dan shook his head.
“Are you a local resident?”
Dan shook his head again.
“In that case it’s $5 for ten minutes, $12 for thirty.”
Dan looked in his wallet. “How long can I get for $10?”
“Just two ten-minute slots,” the man said. “The system only gives a discount for thirty minutes.”
“Twenty minutes it is,” Dan said, emptying his wallet.
The librarian took Dan’s money and handed him a small piece of paper which detailed the booth’s code of conduct. “It basically says keep your clothes on,” the man said with a smile. He walked round to the front of the desk and led Dan to the booth, unlocking the door when they got there. “The time you have left will be in the bottom corner of the screen. I have to activate the camera from my desk, so it’ll be ready in a minute.”
“I don’t need the camera,” Dan said. “Thanks.”
The man nodded and left.
Dan closed the door and opened his backpack, placing the folder on his lap. The computer’s webcam was clipped to the top of the screen rather than built in to the bezel, so Dan lifted it off and turned it to face the wall; better safe than sorry.
He then opened a new browser window and entered his first search term: Lake Toplitz.
As Dan already knew from the letter, Lake Toplitz was in Austria. Fully aware of the ticking clock, he persisted with his technique of scanning the top few results. Toplitz turned out to be located high in the Austrian Alps and was apparently best known as the place where Nazi officials dumped hundreds of millions of dollars worth of counterfeit British currency when they knew the war was lost. There were also persistent rumours of grander treasures hidden in the lake’s murky depths. The money story seemed to be public knowledge and proven fact, so Dan assumed that the IDA were trying to prevent the discovery of these “grander treasures”, whatever they might be.
Next, Dan searched for information about underwater exploration at Mar del Plata. When no results of note came up, Dan read the Argentinian letter in full to see what it said. Frustratingly, there was no direct mention of the original sender’s reasons for requesting the block on exploration. Dan knew a dead end when he saw one, so he swiftly moved the letter to the back of the pile and looked at the next document.
The Austrian and Argentinian letters had both been sent in 1989, just a year after Richard Walker assumed his position at the IDA. The third document was yet another reply, but this one was only eight years old and hadn’t come from a government agency. Rather, this letter was from a still-active Australian company called 3-T.
Dan discerned from the company’s logo that 3-T stood for Treasure Trawl Titans. He learned from their official website that the company’s staff starred in a successful reality TV show centred around their quests for lost treasure. 3-T’s letter didn’t mince its words, defiantly insisting that they were going to proceed with their planned dive in Lake Toplitz despite the original sender’s warning of “volatile materials” near the bottom.
The 3-T letter didn’t add much, but Dan at least imagined that a team of media-savvy Australians would be more likely to comment than either of the foreign governments. All three replies were addressed to a “Mr Kloster”, but Dan’s brief search returned no record of anyone with that name ever working at the IDA. He could only hope that someone at 3-T would have a record of Kloster’s address, or at least his first name.
The next document, preserved in a white envelope with a dark blue seal, contained around a dozen pages of handwriting so ornate that Dan couldn’t even read it at first glance. He put the stapled-together pages aside for now. He then looked at the folder’s final sheet, which was a meticulous record of all authorised dives at Lake Toplitz and all recorded searches for scuttled U-boats off the coast of Argentina.
U-boats?
Already confused, Dan was now totally lost. Where did the IDA fit into any of this? And just as importantly, what did any of this have to do with the Kerguelen Islands?
Devoid of ideas, Dan picked up the long handwritten document again and made a more serious effort to read it. The longer he looked, the more indecipherable it became. This elaborate script was nothing like the other handwriting. It barely even looked like writing at all, striking Dan as something between calligraphy and cryptography; though impressive in its own way, the penmanship failed in its core task of being legible.
Dan intently scanned the lines like a child doing a word search, but with the distinct disadvantage of knowing neither what words he was looking for nor what letters he was looking at.
Several lines in, Dan spotted something: tw
o floating dots above what might have been a U.
An umlaut, he realised. It’s German.
This epiphany didn’t make the writing much easier to read, but it gave Dan something to go on. He soon made out a few words like “bist” and “eine”, but Dan didn’t speak German and knew that the ridiculously ornate writing would have been almost as difficult to decipher even if he had.
Conscious of the clock ticking down, Dan decided to waste no more time on the German writing and to instead focus on contacting someone at 3-T. They were his best bet for identifying Mr Kloster, and Mr Kloster was the key to everything.
Dan’s lap was a mess of assorted documents, so he began to put everything apart from the 3-T letter back into the folder.
The German document wouldn’t go in properly, as though hitting against something. Dan looked inside the folder and saw a folded scrap of white card. He lifted it out and noticed writing on one side.
Within seconds, Dan’s heart was pounding.
The twelve lines on this piece of card provided the context he had been desperately lacking, and it was a context more explosive than anything he had dared imagine.
Dan McCarthy held in his hands physical evidence of the biggest cover-up in human history — not screenshots or scans of secret documents, but the actual files themselves, stolen from the IDA only minutes earlier. With proof like this, there could be no more lying.
Dan read the same dozen lines over and over again, as though expecting them to morph into something less incredible.
But however many times he looked, there it was. Right in front of his eyes, scrawled in the same handwriting as the plans to discredit Billy Kendrick, was a truth so momentous that Dan couldn’t take his eyes off it:
“2/18 — The alien craft at Toplitz was sunk and destroyed. The empty Namtso, Bouvet, and New Swabia spheres were looted from Altaussee, apparently without raising suspicion. — My sole and great concern is the Kerguelen sphere, which was jettisoned in haste, intact, and with the two surviving plaques inside. If that sphere is ever recovered, whether by the Argentines, British, Americans, or anyone else, I fear that the global order we have worked so hard to establish will collapse overnight. If you see merit in trying to prevent such a night from coming, I implore you to focus your efforts on the Kerguelen sphere. I implore you to focus on the Argentine coast.”
An inch or so below this message were two roughly scribbled circles, one containing the text “U-530” and the other “U-977”.
Dan composed himself and stood up. He opened the door.
“Excuse me,” he called to the librarian.
“Yes?”
“I’m going to need the camera after all.”
“Sure thing,” the librarian said.
Dan closed the door and sat down. This story wasn’t going to leak itself.
D minus 95
Musée de l'Armée
Paris, France
Midway through the last appointment of her five-day visit, President Valerie Slater strolled gracefully through the Musée de l'Armée, flanked by her French counterpart on one side and security personnel on the other. A horde of invited photographers and reporters walked alongside them.
The same mild manner and outward-looking philosophy that led some in the American media to label Slater a weak president made her unusually popular in Europe. Foreign media always enjoyed the novelty of high-profile visitors and the only American press who had been invited along were those friendly to Slater’s administration, so the President was making the most of a welcome reprieve from the difficult questions about China which were waiting for her at home.
During what felt like the tenth pause for photographs in as many minutes, President Slater noticed one of her aides waving frantically from the back of the sizeable press pack.
“A little to the left, Madam President,” her official photographer said. Slater obliged, but her eyes kept flicking back to the agitated aide. When the procession continued on its linear tour and the press pack followed in parallel, the aide stayed put. It was Jack Neal, Slater’s most trusted confidante.
Jack called Slater over with his hand, his eyes a picture of urgency. With nowhere private to go, Slater excused herself for a moment and walked to the edge of the security barrier. Some of the security personnel in attendance formed a makeshift cordon between Jack Neal and the intrigued press pack.
“What is it?” Slater whispered. Her voice was tense but not angry; she knew that Jack wouldn’t be doing this unless there was something he absolutely had to tell her.
“There’s been an incident at the IDA building in Colorado Springs,” Jack said, leaning in close to the President’s ear.
Slater leaned back and met Jack’s eyes. “What kind of incident?”
“It’s not terror related,” Jack clarified, realising that he should have done so straight away.
Slater’s expression relaxed. “So what are you telling me?”
“There was a major theft around fifteen minutes ago. The culprit got away.”
“What did they target?” Slater asked.
Jack leaned in again. “Richard Walker’s safe. They took everything.”
President Slater stood in silence for a few seconds. “Has he said anything?” she eventually asked. “Do we know what he had in there?”
“The police said he was evasive and reluctant to cooperate, and that he stopped himself mid-sentence while talking about how documents can’t be classified if bureaucrats don’t know about them. He didn’t explicitly say that he had anything like that — he insisted it was a personal safe — but he wanted roadblocks and a lockdown zone.”
After another pensive silence, this one even longer than the last, Slater thanked Jack and returned to her duties. She retook her place next to the French President, excusing herself and turning to face the press yet again. She tried to force convincing smiles at all the right times, but her usually bright eyes looked as though they hadn’t got the message.
While her host enthusiastically pointed to one thing and another, President Slater’s mind was 4,000 miles away. She had only known Richard Walker well for a few years, but this was long enough to know that he was a man with many secrets. Slater would shed no tears were these secrets indeed personal to Richard, but she suspected that a safe at the IDA would contain more than inane gossip.
The IDA was a political oddity and Slater’s relationship with Richard boiled down to a tacitly understood “don’t ask, don’t tell” kind of deal. She knew that almost three decades as the autocratic head of an agency like the IDA didn’t pass without a few incriminating secrets coming your way, and she vividly recalled a conversation with Richard in which he made clear his total contempt for cyber security.
The basis for Richard’s technophobic stance, bolstered by the recent flood of leaks and whistleblowers, had been simple. He argued long and hard that all digitally stored government files would inevitably leak at some point and that there could never be any surefire way of spotting a breach until those files were splashed across the front pages. If your secrets were kept under lock and key, on the other hand, only one physical location had to be guarded. And should the worst ever happen, Richard said, at least you would know straight away.
Now that Richard Walker had been proven right and wrong at the same time, all that President Slater could do was put on a brave face as she wondered just how bad the worst might be.
D minus 94
Baker Street Public Library
Colorado Springs, Colorado
Dan McCarthy didn’t have time to worry about what kind of trouble he might be getting himself into by leaking the stolen documents. This was bigger than him, he decided. This was bigger than anyone. This was a truth that the world deserved to know, and Dan felt a responsibility to do whatever it took to get it out.
For two good reasons, Dan wanted to leak the files as anonymously as he could. Safety was at the top of the list, of course, but there was also the unavoidable fact that certain thi
ngs about Dan would make people even more reluctant to believe an already far-fetched story if it came from someone like him.
Following a similar train of thought, Dan had already decided against including the unreadable German document in this initial leak. He didn’t want the core truths to be at all clouded by the presence of anything that might take attention away from what really mattered: the explicit mention of an alien craft and the primary evidence that someone at the IDA was covering it up. Happily, this evidence was written legibly in English.
Dan planned to take the folder home and work on the long German document when his mind was clear enough to look for patterns of letters that might enable him to make some sense of it all. Later. For now he felt sure that, even without this document, there was more than enough evidence to prove that the government was engaged in campaigns of both secrecy and disinformation. The motive was unclear, but Dan knew that the implications of his discovery could be earth-shattering.
Though he paid little attention to politics, Dan knew that governments had fallen over a lot less than this and that President Slater’s honeymoon period would be over as soon as the electorate got hold of what was happening on her watch.
The dates in the files showed that the secrecy had been going on for decades, so Dan considered the possibility that Slater might be oblivious to what was going on under her nose. But as far as he was concerned, she was either involved or incompetent; complicit or complacent. Neither looked good for the tenability of her position.
The ticking clock in the corner of the screen prevented Dan from satisfying his curiosity over the four new locations named on the smoking-gun scrap of card: Namtso, Bouvet, New Swabia, and Altausee. He didn’t recognise any of them but, like the German document, he could look into them later.
Dan was, at best, technologically proficient. He couldn’t fix computers or do anything with code, but he knew his way around most systems and software. In any case, the plan he had developed for leaking the files involved only a few short steps.
Not Alone Page 2