“I’ll repeat that for everyone,” Billy said, walking back to Dan from the front of the stage. “What made you decide to leak everything from the folder at once, Dan?”
Wary of saying something that would come back to bite him when he eventually released the letter, Dan hesitated. “Well, I wasn’t in it for the attention,” he said after a few seconds, “so I didn’t want to make people wait without good reason. And there was no reason to hold back any of the files that I made public on Friday.” He gulped, hoping that the conscience-easing qualification at the end of his answer wouldn’t raise any suspicions.
Fortunately for Dan, it didn’t. The rest of the fifteen-minute Q&A passed without any further hairy moments.
“We have two special announcement to close the show,” Billy said, surprising Dan, who only knew about the Timo news. “As has been the case at every other venue, anyone who purchases their ticket tonight for the ET Weekender in Myrtle Beach will receive free coach transport to and from the event. The first announcement is that, along with the guests we’ve already publicised, I’m extending an invitation to Dan McCarthy to be part of our spectacular event, which is now just eleven days away.”
Dan didn’t like being put on the spot, but he definitely wanted to be part of the ET Weekender. While Billy had previously run outdoor events which piggybacked on major music festivals, his latest creation was on a different scale altogether. Around 6,000 weekend camping passes and 12,000 one-day passes to the site had already been sold — a respectable number relative to the 73,000 who had attended one of the legs of the speaking tour so far. A master networker and unrivalled self-publicist, Billy supplemented the core discussion panels featuring prominent activists and academics with performances from several of the “ET curious” music stars who had previously been on his popular podcast. To attract another demographic, he had also secured several retired athletes to take part in his attempt to break the world record for most people cooking outdoors in one place at the same time.
“I’ll be there,” Dan said.
Billy applauded, encouraging the crowd to do the same. He then pointed their attention to the giant screen at the back of the stage, which he had made extensive use of during his show. “Now for the really big news,” he said.
Timo Fiore’s well-tanned face appeared on the screen to a smattering of mild applause and row upon row of unsure expressions; even though he was an ally in their search for truth, many in the audience were understandably hesitant to cheer for a man whose inherited fortune could make a serious dent in any number of humanitarian problems.
A recorded video then played, with Timo beginning by discussing his long-standing commitment to and support for SETI projects around the world. “And like thousands of scientists around the world, people like Billy and Dan are doing excellent work,” Timo said in the kind of flawless English that came with a largely parentless childhood in London, alternating between terms spent at boarding school and summers spent with nannies. “But the kind of evidence that will settle this once and for all is going to come from someone on the inside.”
Dan felt a little slighted by this, since his Kerguelen folder had come from someone on the inside, but he didn’t let it show.
Timo proceeded to announce his $100,000,000 reward for any US government worker, contractor, or official, “no matter how lowly”, who stepped up to the plate and provided the kind of irrefutable evidence he was looking for. “The time is now for a hero to step forward: the whistleblower to end all whistleblowers.”
This time, the crowd applauded enthusiastically. Billy brought the show to a close and instructed the crowd how they could go about purchasing their ET Weekender tickets.
Backstage, Emma scolded Billy for putting Dan on the spot with his invitation. Billy laughed it off. He quickly changed the subject and warned them both to be careful around Marco Magnifico. Emma assured him that she would be in full control, which Dan was glad to hear.
“Until next time,” Billy said, offering Dan his hand. Dan shook it. “You know, I’m so glad it was you who bumped into that thief. Most people would have gone to the police or the press, and it would have been buried.”
“And I’m glad you’re the guy who was being interviewed by Blitz News when they cut to Walker’s speech,” Dan said. “Anyone else would have buried me under his lies.”
“Be careful with Blitz, too,” Billy said.
Emma fielded that one: “You don’t have to tell me.”
Billy laughed. “At least you’re in safe hands,” he said to Dan, before patting him on the back and opening the theatre’s back door for him.
When Dan stepped outside he saw two missed calls on his phone, which hadn’t been able to pick up a signal in the depths of the old theatre. They were both from Clark.
Emma looked at her own phone, also picking up its first signal for several hours, and Dan immediately noticed a look of concern on her face. “What is it?” he said.
She turned the screen to face him.
Above a Blue Dish Network logo and the headline “Update: Confirmed As Blitz Media Equipment”, Dan saw the familiar background of the old drive-in and the familiar face of the old man from the pawnshop.
The man had a shotgun in one hand and a shattered spy drone in the other.
D minus 60
McCarthy Residence
Birchwood, Colorado
Emma insisted on driving back from the Billy Kendrick show in Cheyenne, thinking that Dan looked too shocked by the news of a spy drone being shot down over his house to safely take the wheel.
Phil Norris, the pawnshop owner whose name Dan was glad to finally be reminded of, explained that he had followed the shoe-sized drone after noticing it passing over his own property. He shot it down when it began to hover “right over Big Henry’s backyard,” as he put it. As Henry’s longtime friend, Phil saw nothing odd in walking round the side of the house to collect the fallen drone. He then hurried to the drive-in and told Trey and the watching world what had happened.
Trey examined the drone and found an exposed but intact micro SD card, which he promptly put into his computer. The unsecured data on the card, which included a full recording of the drone’s twelve-minute flight, conclusively pinned it on Blitz Media.
Dan asked Emma during the drive home whether Blitz sending a drone to spy on him constituted the kind of unilateral escalation she had told him that neither side of the XPR-Blitz rift would risk.
“That’s above my pay grade,” Emma answered, “but it’s safe to say this won’t go down well.”
After watching Trey’s impromptu interview with Phil “drone-killer” Norris enough times to memorise the words, Dan decided to call Mr Byrd to check that he was still in the house. The idea of the folder, and especially the letter, being in an empty house with Blitz sniffing around made Dan uneasy.
Mr Byrd took a while to answer his phone but eventually picked up and told Dan that he had crossed the street to his own home shortly after the security cameras had been fitted, which had been around six hours ago. He hadn’t seen the news about the drone or even heard the gunshot.
“I was in the city for an hour or two,” he explained, “so it must have happened then. The cameras will have picked it up, though.”
“And you definitely locked the door, right?”
“Front and back,” Mr Byrd confirmed.
His assurances were enough for Dan.
When Emma pulled into Dan’s driveway after a journey that felt twice as long as its first leg despite the nighttime lack of traffic, Dan jumped out of the car, unlocked the door, and ran into his bedroom. He pulled the folder from under his bed and breathed a sigh of relief that everything was there, exactly as he’d left it. Emma was just walking through the front door when he returned to the living room.
“It’s late,” she said. “I’ll show you how to work the camera console then call a cab.”
“Where is it?”
Emma led Dan into the kitchen and showed hi
m the console, which lay on the counter where she had asked the installers to leave it.
The front of the unit looked like a regular touchscreen tablet, but the back panel had several physical switches and eight steadily blinking green lights arranged in two tight rows of four.
“Are there really eight cameras?” Dan asked.
Emma confirmed that there were, and that this number included several outdoors.
“And how do we know no one can hack into the feeds?”
“Nothing is online,” Emma said. “There’s no alarm or anything, and you can’t access the feeds remotely. This is just a recording system. It’s a local network, and the cameras and console don’t connect to anything except each other.”
Emma activated the console via a button on the side and showed Dan how to switch between camera feeds, viewing up to four at a time. It seemed simple enough. She then showed Dan how to review footage that the system deemed as suspicious, such as something walking past one of the outdoor cameras.
“If we review the flags on high sensitivity, there will be dozens,” she said. Sure enough, the outdoor cameras had flagged more than twenty distinct incidents, some of which were picked up by multiple cameras. Emma tapped an option to play through the incidents. The first was a bird flying past the camera on the side of the house. It was barely perceptible at full speed. The next piece of footage displayed the same bird walking on the grass in front of one of the other outdoor cameras. “See, dozens. But at least this way you don’t have to fast-forward through hours of nothing to see if anything happens.”
On medium sensitivity, the cameras flagged the drone falling to the ground. “Switch it to low,” Dan said, keen to get straight to the footage of Phil Norris from the pawnshop walking round to collect his kill.
After showing street-facing mailbox-cam footage of the installers and Mr Byrd leaving, the console displayed the time of the next incident for several seconds then showed Phil walking along the street towards the house. He knocked on the front door, triggering the eye-level door camera. The footage was impressively high quality.
The rolling footage switched between cameras as Phil walked round the side of the house and picked up the drone from a small and barren vegetable plot.
“Low sensitivity will only pick up people,” Emma said. “Or maybe a big dog, or a cat if it was really close to one of the cameras.”
After Phil walked back to the front of the house, triggering the same cameras in reverse order, the screen displayed new footage with a different timestamp: 23:15. Dan looked at the clock on the wall. It was after 1am, so this definitely couldn’t be him and Emma arriving in the driveway. “What the hell is this?” he asked.
Emma said nothing and focused on the screen.
The first footage to roll was from the street-facing mailbox camera. A black car with no plates pulled up right outside. “Who the hell is that?” Dan asked.
Again, Emma said nothing.
A lone individual stepped out of the car, soon revealed as a young-looking man with blond hair. He approached the front door. His face wasn’t covered, so Dan didn’t jump to any assumptions of malice.
The man knocked on the door three times. After ten or fifteen seconds, he scanned his peripherals then tried to open the door.
“Who the hell is that?” Dan asked, more accusingly than before.
“I have no idea,” Emma said quietly. She still focused only on the screen, as confused and as helpless as Dan.
When the door didn’t budge, the man crouched to the ground. This took him out of the eye-level door-cam’s view. The console’s screen automatically switched to the door-facing mailbox-cam and picked up where the other left off. As the man crouched low to the ground, Emma ran towards the door.
“What are you doing?” Dan called, taking his eyes from the screen.
“It’s a bug,” she said without turning back.
Dan looked at the screen again and saw the man take something from his pocket before balancing it on two upturned fingertips and sticking it to the base of the front door, utilising the small gap that had previously been seen as a draughty annoyance rather than a security risk.
Emma stood at the doorway with the tiny bug in her hand. “Audio only,” she said.
The screen abruptly changed again, catching Dan’s eye. But rather than switch to the street-facing mailbox-cam to show the snooper leaving, his movements activated the first of the side cameras.
“Emma,” Dan said, his eyes glued to the unwelcome footage. “He’s not finished.”
* * *
The next few snippets of footage showed the man planting two more bugs as well as attempting to enter the house via the back door. Emma collected the bugs one by one.
When the man finally left, both Dan and Emma were relieved to see that the next footage was of them pulling into the driveway.
“So do we go to the police?” Dan said, staring at the three audio bugs on his kitchen counter, which Emma had already submerged in water and smashed with her heel. “We have a close-up of the idiot’s face.”
“Are you crazy? This idiot could be the police. He could be the government.”
“So what do we do?”
Emma lifted Dan’s car keys from the counter. “We do nothing. I’ll talk to my bosses and they’ll deal with it.”
“Why do you need the car? Where are you going.”
“Nowhere,” Emma said, “but he could have planted more bugs in the camera’s blind-spots, and some of these things can hear through thin walls. I’m going to go into the car, turn on the engine, and call them from there. You stay here.”
Dan nodded. For the life of him, he couldn’t understand how Emma always had a sensible response to any situation. While she was in the car, Dan ran through the few minutes of footage again. He thanked his stars that the cameras were there, at least, but the bugging still felt like a highly personal violation.
Dan knew that whoever this man was working for must have known that no one was home. He then tried to imagine what might have happened if they had done their dirty work 24 hours later instead; the snooper’s employers would know that Dan was busy with Marco Magnifico, but they wouldn’t likely know when his brother was scheduled to arrive home.
At first Dan smiled at the thought of Clark catching the snake in the act and giving him a well-earned dose of natural justice, but Dan knew how protective and short-tempered Clark could be and ended up grateful that his hypothetical scenario hadn’t come to pass. He wanted Clark to be home, not in prison.
Dan’s eyes shot to the front door when he heard it open.
“They want me to send them the guy’s picture,” Emma said. She walked over to the console and took the old-fashioned but time-efficient approach of photographing the screen with her phone. While waiting for an acknowledgement of their receipt, she turned back to Dan. “Psst,” she said, almost silently. “Get your stuff and come to the car.”
“Why?”
“Just get your stuff.” Emma raised her eyebrows and mouthed the word “folder”.
Dan caught on. He gathered the priceless Kerguelen folder and his old laptop and joined Emma in the car. The engine was still running, protecting their words from prying microphones.
“Listen,” she said. “You can’t stay here tonight.”
“Why?”
“I need to get people in to sweep the place. Everywhere. If there are any more bugs, we have to find them. The firm will pay for a hotel room. You can stay at the Gravesen, where I—”
“I could stay with Mr Byrd,” Dan said. “I want to stay close, in case someone comes back.”
Emma nodded in concession. “Okay. But if they do, you call me. Got that? You don’t go outside, you don’t call the police, you call me.”
“Okay.”
“But don’t tell Mr Byrd we found a bug. We need to keep that quiet until I hear from the firm. Just say that we’re going to sweep for bugs because of what happened with the drone.” Emma looked across the s
treet to Mr Byrd’s house. “Don’t you think it’s maybe a bit late to knock on his door? The lights are all out, so he’s obviously asleep.”
“It’s okay,” Dan said. “He said he’d be there for me whenever I needed him.”
Something about the way Dan said this gave Emma pause. For all the things people had written about Dan’s mental state since Friday, she had seen first hand how intelligent and how sharp he could be. Dan had dealt with new situations, stressful environments and a large crowd better than 95% of people could, and yet there was still something she couldn’t put her finger on. It seemed to her like Dan only saw the best in people, from Billy Kendrick to the brother who had left him to fend for himself. He took people at their word and took that word literally. The only person whose motives Emma had seen Dan question at first glance was her, and her career experience indicated that such suspicion of PR people was an innate human trait.
Emma watched as Dan left the car and knocked on Mr Byrd’s door; as the hallway light came on; as Mr Byrd appeared, rubbing his eyes; as Dan pointed towards the car; as Mr Byrd nodded as though every movement of his head involved a gargantuan effort; as Dan almost skipped back across the street to relay the good news.
In no way was “simple” an appropriate word to describe Dan McCarthy, so Emma’s mind settled on “uncomplicated”.
“He said it’s okay,” Dan blurted out as soon as he got back inside the car.
Emma’s phone buzzed.
Dan heard it. “You better take that.”
“It’s a text,” Emma said. As she read through it, her mouth fell open. “It was Blitz. The guy who planted the bugs writes for The Chat.”
“Is this what they did to Billy?”
Emma looked at Dan carefully. “How do you know about that?”
“He told me. And this must count as an escalation, right? I mean, bugging my house…”
“What else did Billy tell you?” Emma asked, still focused on that.
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