First, he got himself a few disposable email addresses which were composed of randomly generated gibberish and would self-destruct in ten minutes. Next, he created some dummy accounts on the popular social media platforms where he would dump the files. He used a red exclamation mark as the profile picture for each account, hoping it might attract some eyeballs.
Dan then used the chat booth’s clip-on webcam to capture clear photographs of each English document.
Finally, he skimmed through new social media posts to see what terms and hashtags people were using to talk about the theft, which was bound to be big news by now.
The top rising trend was #IDArobbery, with #RichardWalker in second place. Dan felt vindicated in his assumptions when he read “unconfirmed reports” that items had been stolen from Richard Walker’s personal safe.
The message that Dan plastered across multiple sites using multiple accounts was simple: “Secret documents found this morning, 1/4 mile from IDA. Files still in hand. 100% real. #IDArobbery #RichardWalker #BillyKendrick.”
Dan included the Billy Kendrick hashtag because Billy happened to have been in the news for his own reasons over the last few days, so people were already talking about him. Piggybacking on Billy’s publicity was a no-brainer. The core of the plan to discredit Billy was nowhere near as explosive as the rest of the documents, but Dan figured that if Billy’s name made even one person curious enough to click his link then it was worth including. The dummy accounts Dan used to dump the files naturally had no friends or followers, so the hashtags were his only hope of being noticed.
Since Dan could only attach one image to his post, the image he used was a screenshot of two URL links to all of the photos which he had already uploaded to two different image hosts. His posts and uploads would probably be taken down before long, but Dan knew that whoever spotted one of his messages first would save and rehost the images.
The “Files still in hand. 100% real.” part of Dan’s post was intended to assure people that the documents weren’t just photoshopped scans or hoaxes. Had he been able to use more than 140 characters, he would have explained that fully. He didn’t even consider writing a longer explanation across multiple posts, though, because he knew that the key step in making something go viral was making it short and easy to share.
Dan leaned back and looked at the countdown in the corner of the screen. With just over a minute to spare, he had done everything he could. The documents were out there, waiting to be found, and Dan couldn’t have taken them back now even if he wanted to.
Doubts entered his mind about whether the evidence would be as convincing to everyone else as it was to him. He knew the folder was real; he had seen the man who stole it from Richard Walker’s safe and he had lifted it off the street himself.
But would Dan have been so quick to believe the story had someone else been telling it? Probably, he reflected without emotion.
With thirty seconds left, Dan closed everything on the computer and packed away his things. He looked at the documents one by one as he placed them inside the folder. When he saw them all again, he grew in confidence.
There were verifiable letters from government agencies in two countries. There were vindictive plans to discredit Billy Kendrick and “injure belief” in extraterrestrial life by “flooding the media with discoveries of old pressure spheres”, which made sense now that Dan knew some kind of presumably alien sphere was lying in the ocean east of Argentina. This alone was a huge discovery. But even more importantly, there was a meticulous record of all searches in that region and also in Lake Toplitz, where an alien craft had been “sunk and destroyed” and where the mysterious Mr Kloster had failed to convince a team of Australian treasure hunters to avoid.
Despite the presence of letters from more credible government agencies, Dan felt that the Australian company, unbound by politics, presented the biggest hope for identifying Mr Kloster and decisively linking everything to Richard Walker and his IDA.
Dan stepped out of the chat booth as soon as his time expired and the screen locked.
$10 well spent, he thought to himself as he left.
D minus 93
Wolf & Sons Traditional Bookshop
Colorado Springs, Colorado
Dan walked into his workplace oblivious as to how long he had been away.
“There you are,” Mr Wolf said when he saw him, sounding more relieved than angry. “Did you get held up by the roadblocks?”
Dan hesitated. He was terrible at lying but aware enough of this weakness to work around it. As long as he didn’t say anything false, he would be fine. “It was crazy down there,” he eventually said.
“So you didn’t manage to deliver the book?”
“No. Sorry.”
Mr Wolf nodded. “Don’t worry about it,” he said. Though not normally spoken of as a particularly kind or understanding man, Mr Wolf had known Dan for two years and could tell that he was shaken up. “Are you okay, though?”
“Well, I fell off my bike,” Dan said, lifting his shirt to reveal a scrape that didn’t actually look as bad as it felt.
“Ouch. Maybe you should take the day? I’m sure Clint could man the counter by himself until Chelsea comes in.”
“No he couldn’t,” Dan said, more insistently than he had intended.
When people asked Dan where he worked, he always said a bookstore, but that was true only in a technical sense. Though Wolf & Sons had started out as a bookstore, it was now essentially a coffee shop decorated with books.
Dan originally worked three days a week sorting, pricing and selling books. He asked for more hours every week and eventually got his way when another staff member left and Mr Wolf offered him a further two and a half days on the coffee counter.
Now that the coffee counter brought in most of the store’s profits and Dan spent all but one of his days behind it, he couldn’t afford to be seen as expendable. The reason for this was simple: if Mr Wolf decided that one worker could man the counter for more than a few minutes, Dan’s job — the only one he had ever been able to hold down — would be in real danger. Dan had a great thing going with his five-and-a-half-day week, and he would be damned if a sore hip was going to jeopardise it.
“It’s only a few hours,” Mr Wolf said.
This was true enough, given that Friday was Dan’s half day, but he still didn’t like the idea. “I know,” he said, “but Clint can’t do it on his own and I need the money, anyway. A few hours is still a few hours. Besides, this is going to sting just as much if I’m sitting at home. At least here I’ll have something to take my mind off it.”
“Fine by me,” Mr Wolf said. “I’ll ask Clint to deliver that book once the roadblocks are gone. You’ll be okay by yourself behind the counter, won’t you?”
Dan knew that Mr Wolf was testing him. “For a few minutes, I guess,” he said, sticking to the line that all of the staff had agreed to use.
Mr Wolf grinned and walked away. He stopped after a few steps. “Say, what do you think someone would want to steal from the IDA, anyway?”
Dan didn’t say anything.
“I bet it’s something big,” Mr Wolf said, mainly to himself, then continued on his way.
You have no idea, Dan thought.
You have no idea.
Part 2
The Lie
“There may be some career person
sitting around somewhere,
hiding these dark secrets,
even from elected presidents.”
Bill Clinton
D minus 92
IDA Headquarters
Colorado Springs, Colorado
Officially speaking, the Interspace Defense Agency existed to advise policymakers on the potential security implications of new astronomical discoveries. The truth was somewhat more complicated.
Nowhere were the lines between politics, science and war more blurred than at the IDA, and no one epitomised this blurring more than the agency's longtime head, Richard Walker.<
br />
Despite Richard’s weekly press conferences rarely containing anything of interest to the general media, his name alone was still enough to command an audience. The turnout today was significantly larger than normal.
Many international outlets had come to hear the US government’s first official response to the China issue, but a matter of even greater potential importance had arisen only a few hours before the start of this pre-scheduled press conference. Highly atypically, Richard’s arrival came a full twenty minutes late.
Richard fought his trademark limp to take his place at the podium in front of the assembled press. Limp aside, he was as spritely at 68 as many men half his age, laughing in the face of the unfounded rumours of his death which had snowballed just a month earlier following a routine hospital visit. Even major media outlets like Blitz News had reported on the story, too busy keeping up with internet whispers to check for themselves.
The opening line of The Daily Chat’s premature online obituary, which Richard had since framed and hung in his office, summed him up as “an idealistic patriot who abandoned a promising academic career to serve in Vietnam, flourished as a congressman on his return, launched a full-hearted but abortive bid for the presidency, and ultimately found a home at the IDA.”
On the face of it, Richard’s IDA years looked to have been the least eventful of his career, to the extent that many in Washington now openly questioned the need for such an agency. One particularly outspoken senator described the IDA as “the bastard lovechild of Cold War paranoia and outdated notions of American exceptionalism,” though most were more measured in their criticism.
It was certainly true that the end of the Cold War presented something of an existential crisis for the fledgling agency, but Richard had adapted and survived as only he could. Though his IDA journey had been rocky from the outset — with accusations of nepotism and back-scratching politics surrounding his appointment — Richard’s mark was indelible.
Legend had it that even the name had been Richard’s decision. Supposedly offered a job as head of the Inner Space Defense Agency, which would have focused more narrowly on tasks like monitoring airspace and protecting satellites, Richard accepted on the condition that Inner became Inter.
Inter was a firmer sounding prefix, he argued, and the acronym ISDA didn’t bestow the gravitas that such an agency deserved. Richard insisted that people inevitably tried to pronounce four-letter organisations as single words, citing NATO, NASA and FIFA as but three examples. ISDA would soon enough be spoken as iz-da, which sounded too much like a cheap Japanese car. Three letters was the way forward, Richard said, pointing to the CIA, FBI, NFL and NSA.
This story came from the tell-all autobiography of a former political rival, whose account found few willing listeners when painting Richard Walker as a calculating politician who had little in common with the public’s cartoonish conception of him as a flawless public servant.
Richard took private delight in his rival’s version of the ISDA story, since it missed the real reason for the name change altogether. The term “inner space” carried a concrete meaning: it was the space between the Earth and outer space. This restricted the agency’s scope. But interspace? Interspace was a relative term. Interspace meant the space between two objects. One of those objects, presumably, was Earth. But the other could be anything.
As such, the Interspace Defense Agency’s remit theoretically extended to any conceivable extraterrestrial threat, be that a wandering asteroid, solar flares, or any of the alien nonsense that Richard preferred not to talk about. This flexibility was central to the IDA’s survival.
The IDA and Richard Walker had grown so intertwined that it was now generally expected that the agency would be disbanded upon his eventual death. Other than maintaining its own observation network, the IDA’s day-to-day operations largely involved collating data from a myriad of sources and acting as a middleman in discussions over funding for space-related projects. Several of the IDA’s highest-profile personnel were experts who maintained their day jobs in academia or industry while acting as consultants when necessary.
Like the last few presidents before her, President Slater wisely deemed the political cost of making an enemy of Richard Walker greater than the meagre financial cost of an agency whose annual budget never exceeded eight figures.
The two prickly space-related stories which had caught the public’s imagination within the last few days left Slater relieved to have Richard as something of a buffer. Beijing’s formal announcement of plans for a permanently manned research station on the moon and a manned mission to Mars was bad enough, but the second story — the one that had broken only a few hours before Richard was scheduled to address the media about the first — dealt with the only thing the American public had been conditioned to fear more than China.
Ben Gold, Richard’s right-hand man and an accomplished physicist in his own right, reminded the press that flash photography was prohibited during Richard’s speech. A joker near the back flashed his camera in response, drawing chortles from some of his colleagues.
Richard Walker stepped forward and cleared his throat.
The crowd fell silent.
“Does anyone still want to talk about China?” Richard asked, his voice effortlessly resonant.
Laughter filled the press room, puncturing the bubble of tension that had been circling. Most took it as a self-deprecating joke, but Richard knew what he was doing. Like every other, this crowd was putty in his hands.
“Seriously, though,” he continued, raising his hand to quieten the laughter, “there’s no such thing as aliens.”
Richard took a few seconds to meet the gaze of as many reporters as he could. They hadn’t expected him to say anything else, of course, but his assured tone and relaxed eyes were easy to believe.
“I want to be perfectly clear about this point: there’s no “if there was…”. Okay? But if there was an “if there was…”, I would know about it, and I wouldn’t be covering it up. I have spent my life digging for truth, not burying it.”
Richard glanced at his notes, which were single-word bullet points. After confirming that the next point was “Consequences”, he quickly resumed his flawless delivery of a speech he had rehearsed only once.
“I was ready to talk to you all about China’s aggression, and I’m sure you were all ready to listen. The theft this morning was a distraction in itself, but the loss of my personal heirlooms, whatever their monetary worth, is trivial compared to the risk posed by what has followed. Because as risible as it is, this nonsense about Kerguelen and Toplitz and wherever else was mentioned in this so-called “IDA leak” is not the kind of harmless tinfoil-hat ramblings that some of you might think. Baseless claims like this can have serious consequences.”
Richard’s eyes flicked down to his notes again. The next bullet point was “McCarthy”.
* * *
Richard told the press that had he not already identified the source of the fabricated leak as “an alien-obsessed loner from right here in Colorado,” he would have assumed the leak was a well-timed Chinese ploy to distract attention from their recent announcement.
After saying that he didn’t want to give the individual in question the oxygen of publicity, Richard seemed to hesitate. He turned to Ben Gold, who shrugged.
“His name is Dan McCarthy,” Richard said, very suddenly. Every reporter in the room scribbled this name down. Ben Gold looked to the floor. “And from what we know about Mr McCarthy, I don’t think that what he did today was an act of malice. I would actually like to retract what I just said about him being an alien-obsessed loner. I don’t want to make this personal.”
The corner of Richard’s eye caught Ben nodding in approval of this retraction.
“The only reason I have chosen to identify Mr McCarthy is to put this issue to bed. If I stood here and said “we know who it is, but we can’t say,” the question would keep coming up. And let’s step into the shoes of our allies. If other go
vernments believed for a second that we were hiding something like this from them, they would have a right to feel aggrieved. The less said about our enemies, the better. But I’m sure you can see the national security implications of not nipping this thing in the bud. Now, onto China.”
The crowd began to murmur. Questions came at Richard like bullets, and the barrage didn’t stop when he raised his hands for silence.
“What about Hans Kloster?” someone yelled above the rest.
“Don’t you dare drag Hans into this,” Richard said angrily.
“What about Kendrick?” another reporter asked.
“Billy Kendrick?” Richard chuckled. His expression changed instantly. The crowd quietened down to hear him out. “Do you know what? We haven’t ruled out the possibility that Mr McCarthy has been duped and actually believes that the documents he posted are real. Which none of them are, of course. And if you’re asking me who else I think might have fabricated something like this, then Billy Kendrick is as good a bet as anyone. Billy has been ramping up his self-promotion recently, and you all know as well as I do that the man never met a spotlight he didn’t like.”
Most of the crowd were smiling again. But one man, standing near the front, wasn’t.
The reporter spoke out of turn: “But McCarthy’s post implied that he found the folder on the street this morning. Are you suggesting that Billy Kendrick knew you were going to be robbed and dumped a fake folder on the street for someone to find, or are you suggesting that Billy Kendrick carried out an armed robbery in a government building? Because someone is lying here, and if you’re saying that McCarthy might think he’s telling the truth…”
Not Alone Page 3