“Say, when’s your brother next home?”
“Hopefully by next Sunday,” Dan said. He was slightly surprised that the man knew about Clark being away, but it was a pretty small town and Dan knew how regularly his dad used to give the man his custom. “Hopefully sooner.”
“Good, good,” the man said. There was a sincereness in his voice that Dan didn’t hear much of these days; it certainly didn’t sound like Clark owed him money or anything like that. “You take care of yourself now, Dan. Stay on your guard.”
Dan nodded. “Thanks again.”
The $85 now sat on Dan’s front seat — four twenties and a five — waiting for Trey to arrive to complete the trading sequence that would hopefully unlock the secrets of the German letter.
Dan listened to some music on the radio, making it through a song and a half before he spotted a sky-blue van in his rearview mirror. When it passed by, Dan saw the Blue Dish Network insignia on the side and honked his horn a few times.
Fortunately, Trey recognised Dan’s beaten-up silver hatchback from their early morning interview. He pulled over and reversed towards Dan’s car then stepped out of his van and walked the rest of the way. He had a bag in his hand.
“Hey, man,” Trey said as he stepped into the car, trying not to bring too much rain in with him. “Sorry I’m so late. I took Louise home at five, then after dinner I couldn’t be like “I have to be there by six” without sounding suspicious, you know? How long have you been waiting?”
Dan looked at the clock. 6:49. “Seven minutes,” he said. “I was pretty late, too.”
Trey then chuckled as he noticed how short Dan’s hair was. “Did she do that?”
“It was her idea,” Dan said. “For a photoshoot. Did you get the stuff?”
“The stuff?” Trey smiled. “Do you want to make it sound any more suspicious?” He handed Dan the bag.
Dan looked inside and saw the book: Traditional and Antiquarian Calligraphy. Even better, the digital translator was there, too. It was around the size of a TV remote control and folded open to reveal a keyboard on the lower half and a wide calculator-like screen above it. The thing was branded as a tool for tourists, as Dan had expected, and it could translate between several languages using either voice or text input.
“I couldn’t find anything that just did German,” Trey said. “Because I know that would have been cheaper. This one was hiding in the travel section of a giant bookstore.”
Dan turned it over and saw a sticker for $25, which was less than he had feared and meant that the total was just $55. “It’s perfect,” he said. “You’re sitting on the money, though.”
Trey lifted his weight and pulled the notes out from under him. He kept $60 and handed Dan the rest then reached for his own wallet to get $5 for Dan’s change.
“Don’t worry about it,” Dan said.
“Are you sure?”
“Yeah, you had to go looking for it.”
Trey put his wallet away without any faux reluctance, which Dan appreciated.
“So what about the British guy?” Trey said. “Godfrey. That’s pretty big, right?”
“I’m not supposed to say anything about it until tomorrow,” Dan said.
Trey nodded. “Understood. What time will you be at the media outpost?”
“Media outpost? Is that what they’re calling it?”
“Yeah. Maria from ACN has been saying it on air all day. It’s getting busy already, but I think this place is gonna explode in the next week. We’ll have trucks instead of vans and international press flooding in from everywhere you can think of. Usually when something big happens, they control which networks can park where and everything like that. I’ll get pushed out, Maria will probably get replaced by one of ACN’s national anchors, and outsiders will be everywhere.”
“You’ll get a space,” Dan said. He was excited by the prospect of international press filling the drive-in lot but could understand Trey’s concerns. “Emma will make sure. I’ll just tell her that I want you there.”
Trey didn’t say anything for a few seconds. “Who is she, anyway? I’ve never seen Blitz guys listen to anyone like that one listened to her.”
“She has a way,” Dan said, leaving it at that.
“Sure does,” Trey shrugged. “So yeah, what time tomorrow?”
“I have a TV thing in Texas in the afternoon, but we might decide to say something before that. It depends what happens overnight. I won’t be out again tonight, though, so you won’t miss anything if you go home.”
“This is pretty much going to be my home from now on,” Trey said, “in case something big happens. It’s weird: the backdrop of those rusty shutters and that ancient drive-in sign is already what viewers associate with this story. Everyone wants reports from here. Whatever footage the other vans get is theirs, but I can sell mine to everyone else. Seriously, one big night here could earn me more money than I usually make in three months. This crappy old drive-in is the epicentre of the biggest story in years. When they admit it’s true and you do a press conference here to say “I told you so,” this place will be a tourist destination, just like that.” Trey snapped his fingers.
Dan liked how sure Trey was that everything was going to turn out the right way. “But you still don’t have a reporter,” he suddenly thought. “What use is blank footage of the backdrop?”
“I’m sure I’ll be able to stand in front of a camera and talk if I really have to,” Trey said. His work typically involved recording footage of developing incidents and selling it to networks for them to dub commentary over for their own broadcasts, but this situation was anything but typical.
“Listen,” Dan smiled. “If I can stand in front of a camera and talk…”
Trey laughed. “Anyway, man,” he said, opening his door. “I better let you get home.” He tapped Dan’s bag and winked. “You’ve got work to do.”
D minus 73
Stevenson Farm
Eastview, Colorado
Richard Walker sat in the kitchen of his weekend home, growing impatient as he waited for Rooster to go outside to do his business. The storm Richard had forecast hadn’t come to much, but the ground outside the kitchen door was wet enough to give the old dog pause.
The media storm over Dan McCarthy, on the other hand, had turned into an international tempest more quickly than Richard could have imagined. Though he usually went to great lengths to keep his weekends free of all work related stress, Richard had taken several phone calls from Ben Gold over the course of the day and was now right up to date.
The first surprise came early in the morning when McCarthy talked to the media, but that was nothing compared to Prime Minister Godfrey’s incredible rant about American politics and what he saw as a concerted effort to suffocate the truth.
Richard had long admired Godfrey and knew he was playing a calculated game to distract attention from domestic unrest, but he still couldn’t believe how far the Prime Minister had gone. Calling out American hypocrisy over Mars and the moon was one thing, but making incendiary comments about the war was among the riskiest moves any leader could make.
Richard didn’t care that Godfrey had made a joke out of his capture, but the general strength of the Prime Minister’s response was highly concerning; so concerning, in fact, that Richard couldn’t even enjoy Slater’s public savaging.
The difference between Godfrey’s speech and Slater’s response summed the two leaders up perfectly in Richard’s eyes. Both had spoken out of desperation, but while Godfrey did it with a grin on his face and conviction in his voice, Slater couldn’t even drown out a lone heckler.
As Rooster finally went outside, Richard couldn’t help but wonder what people in China must be making of it all. He imagined that 95% of Americans couldn’t differentiate the Chinese premier’s name — Ding Ziyang — from any other string of vaguely oriental-sounding syllables, in no small part because the Chinese government conducted most of its business so quietly. Richard thought about th
is. Though he would certainly never voice it publicly, he had long wondered whether a shift towards the Chinese model of politics, free of the PR-based election cycles that valued soundbites over policy, might just be an improvement over the kind of red-vs-blue popularity contest that could drop a non-entity like Valerie Slater into the White House.
Rooster sulked back inside after a few minutes and shook himself dry.
“You couldn’t have done that at the door?” Richard asked.
The dog looked at him then did it again.
Richard smiled an unusually honest smile at Rooster’s eternal stubbornness and opened the door to the hallway to let him through. He then limped over to close the kitchen door, noticing a steady stream of water flowing past the house from a clogged gutter. Rooster had been hesitant to step through the stream, and it gave Richard pause, too.
He watched as pieces of moss and a fallen bird’s nest were swept away by the flow. Though today’s storm hadn’t been as bad as Richard had feared, McCarthy hadn’t cracked and Godfrey had entered the fray.
Richard Walker then closed the door and wiped a few raindrops from his shirt. He didn’t know what tomorrow would bring, but something told him it wouldn’t be pretty.
SUNDAY
D minus 72
McCarthy Residence
Birchwood, Colorado
Sunlight crept through the slits in Dan’s blinds, alerting him to the fact that he’d spent all night at his desk trying to make sense of the German document.
Dan’s initial effort to decode the text on Friday night had revealed little more than the word Führer as he struggled to identify the same letters anywhere else. Fortunately, the book Trey had managed to source from Wolf & Sons allowed Dan’s progress to accelerate rapidly.
Traditional and Antiquarian Calligraphy, which was a surprisingly thick and dense volume, aided Dan by explaining and illustrating how one letter could look very different depending on which letters surrounded it.
Dan read the book from cover to cover, which took a lot longer than he had expected. And even though the German writing was more ornate than any example from the book, Dan had made great progress in the two hours since he had begun applying its identification techniques.
Efficiency had always been important to Dan, so he opted to transcribe the document into typed German before beginning the more straightforward process of translating it into English. He was also wary of translating it as he went because he knew it was going to take more than one sitting to decode the whole thing and that he wouldn’t be able to concentrate on his necessary media appearances if he knew some but not all of what the document said.
For reasons Dan couldn’t quite pin down, he didn’t want Emma or anyone else to know about this German letter until he knew exactly what it said. He didn’t want to think that it was solely about the ego trip of wanting to know first, but he couldn’t deny that was part of it.
After two focused hours of letter-by-letter analysis, Dan was almost halfway through. He was neither pleased nor displeased by this rate of progress; it wasn’t quick, but at least it was happening.
Dan recognised a few words immediately; Konvention had to be convention, he thought, and Amerikanisch was equally apparent. Proper nouns like Wilhelm and Bonn spoke for themselves, but the most encouraging word so far was Argentinien.
Dan left his bedroom and looked out of the house’s front window to check for news vans. There were none. He was surprised by the time but didn’t feel particularly tired. 5:30 was too late to sleep, anyway, so he turned on the TV to catch up on what was happening and give his eyes a much-needed break from the flicks and curls of the no-longer-impenetrable German writing.
Maintaining his personal boycott of all things Blitz, Dan watched ACN. Maria Janzyck was talking from the drive-in, above a caption which read “Birchwood Media Outpost”. Dan would never get used to that. More importantly, and more intriguingly, the right-hand side of the screen was filled with a picture of a document, printed in English. Parts of the document were blown up to a readable size.
Dan listened to Maria and read at the same time. The document was a “fully verified” letter which had been sent to NASA in 1986 by none other than Hans Kloster. In it, Kloster warned against any further attempts to communicate with extraterrestrial intelligences via physical media in spacecraft, such as the Pioneer Plaques and the Voyager Golden Record of the 1970s.
This was obviously huge news, as Maria made clear, because it appeared to corroborate Dan’s leak.
But Dan focused on something else. Underneath the printed name “Hans J. Kloster”, there was a signature. Dan had seen this signature before.
He sprinted into his room and returned to the TV with the German letter in his hand. He flipped to the final page and held it beside the screen.
Sure enough, the signatures matched.
* * *
Dan returned to his task, spurred on by the confirmation that the letter he was in the process of decoding and translating had been handwritten by Hans Kloster. This possibility had already crossed Dan’s mind, but he hadn’t been able to square the fact that the replies to Kloster’s other letters were typed. In the absence of a written date, he could only assume that this letter was much older.
After another hour or so, Dan’s phone rang. His eyes flicked to the clock in the corner of his computer’s screen. It showed 6:30, which wasn’t early for Emma. He picked up his phone and swiped the screen to answer without looking.
“Hey,” he said.
“What are you doing, man?” It wasn’t Emma; it was Clark.
“Uh…”
“Why did I see you on TV yesterday?” Clark asked. “What happened to guard up, mouth shut?”
“They were outside in the middle of the night,” Dan tried to explain. “I had to promise to talk to get them to leave.”
“Who?”
“Media people.”
Clark sighed. “Okay, well, whatever. I’m coming home on Tuesday.”
“This Tuesday?”
“Yeah. Maybe Wednesday morning by the time I get there. And I don’t want to see you again until then. No interviews, no nothing. Is that clear?”
“I’m booked to do a TV panel today,” Dan said.
“Cancel it.”
“You’re not here!” Dan snapped. “You don’t know what’s happening. This thing isn’t blowing over. I can either take the wheel or let them lie about me. About us.”
“Dan…”
“It’s not a live show,” Dan said. “I get to vet the questions before we start and they won’t air anything that makes me look bad.”
“So they say.”
Dan paused. He didn’t want to say anything about Emma, because he knew how Clark would react to the idea of a cash-hungry PR rep sniffing around. It would have been too difficult to explain why he trusted Emma and how capable she had proven, so Dan didn’t even try. “I’ll be fine,” was all he said.
“And this one TV thing is all you’re doing?” Clark asked.
“Yeah,” Dan said. The upcoming appearance at Billy Kendrick’s show in Cheyenne, now only a day and a half away, genuinely slipped his sleep-deprived mind. “I think so.”
Clark didn’t say anything for a few seconds, as though quietly accepting Dan’s will. “Did you see this new Kloster thing?” he asked.
“Just a few minutes ago. It backs up something else that I haven’t released yet. It’s big.”
“You’ve got more stuff?”
“One thing,” Dan said. “I don’t want to tell you too much on the phone, though.”
“So why mention it? If the line wasn’t safe, you’d already have said too much. This is what I mean, man… you don’t think. I’m serious about this: you’re not going to tell anyone that you have something new until I’m home, okay? You’re not going to say anything you haven’t already said. Anything. And I’m not asking you this, Dan, I’m telling you. Are you listening?”
“Yeah.”
“Pr
omise,” Clark pushed.
“I won’t tell anyone.”
“Promise.”
“Okay, I promise! I wasn’t going to say anything, anyway,” Dan said meekly. Clark wasn’t usually so forceful with him, but then they weren’t usually in situations like this. And Clark was Clark; he was always going to be more assertive than Dan and he was never going to mince his words about anything, especially if he thought it was for Dan’s own good. Clark had been looking out for Dan since before Dan could walk or talk, and Dan couldn’t begin to imagine what it must have been like for Clark trying to deal with the helplessness that came with watching everything from a distance.
“Good,” Clark said. “I’ll see you in a few days, then.”
“Yeah. See you soon.”
“Oh, and Dan…”
“Yeah?”
“Remember the promise.”
D minus 71
RMXT Studio #2
Amarillo, Texas
Dan and Emma’s chauffeur-driven car sped past the unmanned security checkpoint at RMXT’s studio complex after a long drive, almost all of which Dan had slept through. The vast complex was dominated by a tall building where local news was produced and filmed, surrounded by several smaller buildings used for everything from post-production work to radio broadcasting.
With a hint of envy over how well rested he looked and a hint of guilt over how peaceful he looked, Emma nudged Dan awake.
She had encouraged him to sleep having been worried by how tired he seemed at the start of the drive. Her concerns weren’t cosmetic — hair and makeup would take care of that — but rather over how well Dan could function during his crucial TV appearance if his mind was deprived of rest. Dan didn’t argue. The only thing of note that Emma mentioned before he faded was that she would be staying in Colorado for another seven days. Clark would be home on Tuesday, so Dan didn’t mind too much that she had to leave so soon.
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