“Did you take it?”
“I left it,” Billy said. “You can’t expect to dip your foot in a pool full of sharks and walk away whenever you feel like it.”
Dan didn’t know what to say.
“I don’t mean you,” Billy sought to clarify. “And I don’t mean her. Not Emma Ford. This was, I don’t even know, seven or eight years ago. She was barely in the door. The top people from XPR at that time have left now, anyway, so it’s pretty much a different company.”
“But you said you’ve had dealings with her specifically,” Dan said.
Billy nodded. “Much later. Maybe two years ago. She repped a few of the bigger names I had on my show. We did a few video chats to go over what I couldn’t ask them, but it was only ever personal stuff. She always seemed more open minded than the talent agents I usually deal with. She said she was covering for someone who was sick and that she didn’t normally rep entertainers. I think her work is more of the bigger picture behind-the-scenes stuff; you know, controlling media narratives.”
“So you think it’s a good thing that she came to me?”
“It’s an excellent thing,” Billy insisted. “Did you sign anything, or are XPR just keeping the booking fees from your appearances in exchange for giving you the exposure and trying to shape the narrative?”
“I didn’t sign anything.”
“Even better,” Billy said.
“How much did you have to pay them to let me come here?” Dan asked.
Billy looked surprised. “Nothing. Emma called me on Saturday morning and said you were desperate to do it.”
“She didn’t bring it up until Saturday afternoon,” Dan said. “I jumped all over it, obviously, but I wouldn’t have even known it was an option if she hadn’t suggested it. She said the firm didn’t think it was worth doing until she talked them into it. They wouldn’t even give us the car.”
“Hmmm,” Billy mused. “She wouldn’t have wasted a day coming here if she didn’t have some kind of an angle.”
Dan looked out at rows and rows of empty seats. The traditional theatre had three tiers of seating, with room for around 3,000 spectators in total. “I want to know what the angle is,” Dan said.
Billy tapped him on the back and started walking. “Me too.”
* * *
Only a few paces after Billy and Dan passed the framed piece of curtain on their way back to find Emma, she appeared through the door up ahead.
“Hey,” Dan said. “We were just coming to—”
Emma briskly raised a hand which silenced Dan with immediate effect. Only now did he notice that she was talking on the phone.
“Hold on a second,” Emma said into the phone. “He’s here right now.”
Somewhat reluctantly, Dan held his hand out to take the phone. To his relief, and surprise, Emma gave it to Billy.
“Hello?” Billy said, as surprised as Dan that he was apparently receiving a call on Emma’s phone. “Oh, Timo! Always a pleasure.”
Dan immediately turned to Emma. She was smirking.
Billy raised a finger to excuse himself and returned to the relative privacy of the stage.
“Timo?” Dan said. “Timo Fiore? How in the hell do you know Timo Fiore?”
“I know everyone,” Emma grinned.
In the early planning stages of Billy Kendrick’s speaking tour, Billy sought crowd-sourced funding for his travel and living expenses while on the road. He promised to itemise and publicise every cent he spent, and only took the crowd-funding route in an effort to keep ticket prices low and avoid the need for corporate sponsors.
Billy reached 40% of his target within 48 hours, at which point Blitz News and other Blitz Media outlets began mocking his cap-in-hand approach and warning the public against contributing. Contributions ground to a halt until Timo Fiore, an exceedingly wealthy individual with great enthusiasm for Billy’s work, donated 100% of the target so that Billy could both undertake his ambitious tour and also refund everyone who had already contributed.
Timo’s fortune — which floated around the thirty to forty billion dollar mark — made him something between the second and fifth wealthiest person in Europe, dependent on trivial things like stock fluidity and exchange-rate fluctuations.
As the forty-something heir to two vast fortunes, Timo’s wealth was inherited rather than earned. An only child of two blue-blooded only children, Timo won the genetic lottery. But with no desire to manage any kind of empire, he wasted no time in cashing in his chips.
Despite doing nothing to earn his controlling interests in two titanic corporations, Timo had been roundly praised for extracting an eye-watering price from the Qatari oil magnates who purchased the Pierre & Jonas fashion house inherited from his mother’s side of the family. Some observers criticised the sale of his father’s Paldor supercar firm to an already huge Italian conglomerate as rushed and accused Timo of xenophobia for refusing to consider a more lucrative Japanese bid, but in general it was accepted that he had done well with the sell-offs.
Timo’s father’s sole wish had been that Paldor stayed in Italian hands, while his mother demanded only that Timo would continue her philanthropic efforts. In the five years since his father’s passing, which almost immediately followed his mother’s, Timo had kept both of his promises.
Dan, like most others, had little affection for the hyper-rich, but he knew that Timo could be a powerful ally; had Dan known Emma had his number, he would have asked to speak to Timo straight away.
Timo owned four of the most advanced radio observatories in the world, three of which he had built from scratch and another which he had saved from closure. He was a forthright believer in the existence of intelligent extraterrestrials and, though he had never publicly accused anyone of covering anything up, he was outspoken in his insistence that space observation and even exploration should not be the sole domain of government agencies.
Dan tried again to make out some of Billy’s words through the stage door, then gave up and asked Emma the obvious question of why she had approached Timo.
Frustratingly, Emma refused to “spoil the surprise.”
Knowing her well enough to know that she wouldn’t budge, Dan moved on to the question he’d been going to ask before the subject of Timo came up in the first place: “Why did your firm tell Billy this whole thing was my idea when you told me it was the firm’s idea?”
“Because the firm don’t know the good news about Timo. I had to go solo for that one, because he wouldn’t have agreed to give them any kind of cut.”
Dan furrowed his brow. “A cut of what? And what good news? And if it’s so good, why is it secret?”
“Sometimes you have to hold good news back until the time is right,” Emma said.
Dan’s mind automatically turned to the Kloster letter, currently in the care of Mr Byrd and still unknown to everyone bar Dan and whoever was in on the cover-up.
“It’s worth the suspense,” Emma said. “Trust me.”
Dan suddenly leapt away from the door, hearing footsteps on the other side.
“Ho-ly shit,” Billy said as he stepped through. He then handed the phone back to Emma, who was smiling almost as broadly as he was. “I knew you had something.”
“What is it?” Dan asked, agitated at being the only one who didn’t know.
“A bounty,” Billy said.
Emma nodded and took over. “He’ll give any government worker who brings forward irrefutable evidence of intelligent extraterrestrial life guaranteed safe harbour and a one-hundred million dollar reward.”
“What’s in it for him?” Dan asked.
Billy shrugged. “Prestige, probably.”
“I don’t think it's just that,” Emma mused. “See, there are very few things money can’t buy. I have a feeling our man Timo wants to find out if the truth is one of them.”
D minus 62
White House
Washington, D.C.
In lieu of a spoken reply to William Godfrey’s late
st inflammatory comments, President Slater and Jack Neal penned a short statement. Godfrey’s escalation left them with no choice but to respond in stronger language than they had used thus far.
Jack handed the statement to the White House’s head press officer and instructed that it should henceforth be quoted as the administration’s official response.
All reporters who called after this point were given the same few lines. In them, President Slater scolded John Cole in no uncertain terms and encouraged Godfrey to keep him in check. She emphasised her “extreme disappointment that the Prime Minister’s politically motivated outbursts have descended into sustained personal belligerence.” The verbose wording was intended as a jab at Godfrey, but this went over most people’s heads exactly as Jack Neal had tried to warn Slater it would.
At Jack’s suggestion, Slater had at least agreed to include a line about her hitherto undisclosed conversation with Diane Logan, Godfrey’s Deputy PM. The statement mentioned “a constructive conversation” in which Diane was “keen to stress that the Prime Minister’s words do not reflect the views of his own party, much less the British people.”
The final line was a direct response to Godfrey and Cole’s accusations of American selfishness and hypocrisy: “In the face of the very real international challenges we face,” Slater wrote, “a united front among natural allies has never been more crucial. Personal differences between elected leaders cannot and will not be allowed to harm the synergistic relationship between our two countries. If William Godfrey has a problem unrelated to his role as Prime Minister, he would be well advised to address it in private rather than continue to destabilise the international community and sully his own office with these transparent attempts to divert attention from his own domestic failings.”
Within minutes, the statement was everywhere.
D minus 61
Beanstox Bowl
Cheyenne, Wyoming
Emma relayed President Slater’s statement to Dan before he took his seat behind the curtain on Billy Kendrick’s stage. That Slater had entirely avoided referencing the leak frustrated both of them, but the news of Timo Fiore’s $100,000,000 bounty strengthened Dan’s belief that the President was swimming against a tide that was about to sweep her up and slam her into a wall of her own lies.
Even since Slater’s previous public comment, it had been verified that Hans Kloster had indeed pleaded with NASA to halt all active SETI. Emma suggested that Slater was probably being advised to stop denying the story she wanted to go away, which could only ever serve to give it more oxygen. It was a sensible and inevitable move, Emma said, but Dan knew Slater was crazy if she thought the wave of truth coming her way could be avoided so easily.
All 3,000-plus audience members were by now in their seats, and a sly peek showed Dan that they were a very diverse crowd. Most surprising to Dan was the large number of women in their twenties and thirties; for whatever reason, he had always assumed that Billy’s primary demographic was older men.
Billy promptly took to the stage to rapturous applause. He thanked everyone for coming and got on with his well-rehearsed routine. It involved a lot of graphics and audience participation, as usual, but proceeded at an accelerated pace to ensure that he could get through the whole thing and still leave plenty of time to address the developing story of the IDA leak. Billy had done similar during his Friday and Sunday night shows, but tonight he had to be even brisker to make sure everyone got to see his special guest. Billy had the theatre for three hours, but the show was only supposed to run for two and he knew that some people would have pre-arranged travel or childcare commitments.
The meat of Billy’s show centred around the book he was best known for, How And Why: Five Scenarios For Disclosure. Commonly known as Five Scenarios, Billy’s magnum opus wasn’t just a scenario analysis; it was the scenario analysis. There had been official NASA-backed analyses of contact scenarios in the past, but nothing on disclosure. Disclosure was the dirty word that the establishment avoided like the plague. Billy Kendrick, utterly sure that aliens were real and that the elites already knew, had long felt that disclosure was an inevitable step on the road to contact.
In Billy’s mind, “capital-D Disclosure” would be a species-defining moment. He reminded the crowd that Disclosure would be an admission of a lie as well as an acknowledgement of the truth, and implored them to refrain from any violent expressions of anger at being kept in the dark once the truth came out.
He shared his expectation that baseless fear would be the most prominent emotional reaction and predicted chaos in the first few hours after the announcement, which he now took for granted as an inevitability. “Gas pumps will run dry and shelves will lay empty for a while,” he said, “but a week later everything will reset into the new normal. Our place in the universe and our systems of government might transform in the months to come, but most of your day-to-day lives will not. Some industries will fall, but new ones will rise in their place. I know I’m preaching to the converted here, but we have to stress that capital-D Disclosure does not equate to capital-D Disaster. Make sure your friends and families know that.”
After a speedy and semi-distracted run through his slides on “knock-on effects,” Billy turned to the tactics and strategies he believed were still being used to suppress the truth, including the central idea of a “laughter curtain”. In simple terms, Kendrick talked about unspecified elites hiding their secrets behind lies and attempting to “link real issues with joke issues” so that anyone who questioned the official line could be dismissed out of hand as a lunatic.
He cited Area 51 as a good example, insisting that it was “almost certainly brimming with above-top-secret military tech” but that an unshakable association with little green men had been carefully cultivated to render serious discussion impossible.
Before long, Billy moved on to Dan’s leak. “I’d be lying if I said that the phrase “too good to be true” never crossed my mind,” he said, “but everything that’s happened since Dan McCarthy leaked those files has corroborated their contents. If anyone is still lost as to why Richard Walker and the IDA would cover this up, it’s not complicated; this is what happens when we let Cold War-era mentalities run space agencies. The IDA always was and always will be a corrupt tool of the military industrial complex, and Richard Walker always was and always will be the perfect IDA leader. Even when he tried to bury Dan on Friday afternoon, he mentioned that old phrase of his about protecting our “well-earned national security advantage.” Walker has been using that line since 1988.”
Billy walked to the other side of the stage and continued. “And now we know what it means,” he said. “Think about it: what happens when we find out that we’re not alone? What happens when we as a species start defining our existence in contrast to something else rather than each other? What happens to our ridiculous levels of military spending when we realise that we’re all citizens of one of many inhabited planets? Hmm? What happens to “our” well-earned national security advantage then?”
Dan considered Billy’s words from his backstage seat. They made sense.
“That’s what this is all about,” Billy went on. “The IDA exists to protect that advantage from the truth that will render it obsolete. I should note that this doesn’t mean I think the aliens will be hostile… far from it. I’ve covered that before, and Dan did the same on Focus 20/20 last night, so I won’t address it now. What I do want to touch on is something William Godfrey said yesterday. Now, I never like to be on the same side as a snake-tongued scumbag like Godfrey, but his point about this being “an alien opportunity rather than an alien problem” really is worth reflecting on. Aside from the obvious and inherent potential for uniting humanity, the possibilities are endless. The government could be sitting on a revolutionary method of energy generation, interstellar propulsion, or any number of other things. I think Dan touched on this last night, too. Speaking of Dan… I’m going to see him soon, so does anyone have anything they’d like to
ask him?”
Dozens of hands shot up.
“Hold that thought,” Billy said. He walked off to the back of the stage and called Dan over with his hand.
A few audience members shifted in their seats, hoping their hunches were right.
Dan then stepped into the spotlight with Billy, drawing gasps of genuine surprise that soon morphed into loud cheers and applause.
“He’s all yours,” Billy smiled.
* * *
Everything Billy and Emma had told Dan about the crowd being on his side was quickly proven correct.
Dan found himself enjoying standing in front of the fully engaged crowd so much that he considered ramping their enthusiasm up even further by mentioning the untranslated Kloster letter.
The initial reason for leaving the letter untranslated and keeping it quiet was Clark’s order not to mention it, combined with Dan’s recognition that it would be easier to stay quiet if he didn’t know what the letter said. But things had started moving faster than Dan expected since he last spoke to Clark, what with the success of Focus 20/20 and now Timo Fiore’s game-changing intervention. The news of Dan’s upcoming hypnotism on live TV brought new concerns that something might slip out of his mouth before he wanted it to, and he ultimately decided to maintain his silence for now. A promise was a promise, and a promise to Clark meant more than any other.
Billy played the role of emcee, asking for questions and only passing them over to Dan if he considered them cordial and worthwhile. The next question, once again, turned Dan’s mind to the German letter.
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