“He said Blitz harassed him and that your firm had the evidence and offered him a compensation deal if he gave them a cut, but he turned it down. He did say that your new bosses are different from the old ones, though, so maybe the new ones could call Blitz out for doing it to me and Billy?”
“Dan, Billy doesn’t know how deep that thing went. It’s a can of worms you don’t want to go near; trust me. He wasn’t the only target, and he was nothing like the highest profile.”
“But he’s tied in with the leak. And Blitz going after him so long ago shows that they—”
“They did the same things and worse to Richard Walker,” Emma said, cutting Dan off. “And the last thing we want is a story that makes people sympathetic to him.”
Dan was stunned. “Walker? Who else? President Slater?”
“No one knew who Slater was eight years ago,” Emma said, shaking her head. “Seriously, like I told you in the salon on Saturday: this is the kind of stuff it’s better not to know.”
Dan thought back to eight years ago, when he was an excited 13-year-old visiting the IDA. It didn’t make sense in his mind that, while he was doing that, Emma was already swimming with the sharks at XPR. If Emma really was 31, which Dan had no reason to doubt, she wore the years remarkably well; particularly compared to Clark, who was only 28 but looked a solid 40. Some of it might have been the cheerful cadence of her voice and some might have been the obvious effort she made to present a flawless face to the world, but whatever it was came together to form something greater — and younger — than the sum of its parts.
“I should have had cameras and alarms installed from the start,” Emma said, as much to herself as to Dan, “but at least we have them now. You might as well go across to your neighbour’s house now. I have to wait here for the… I dunno, actually. What kind of job is it that sweeps for bugs? Anyway, I have to wait for those people. The firm are arranging it.”
“I’ll wait, too,” Dan said.
Emma reached across Dan and opened his door. “Get in his house, get in a bed, put that folder under your pillow, and close your eyes.”
Dan ducked his head to avoid banging it on the car’s doorframe and stepped out.
“What are you smiling at?” Emma asked.
Dan crouched down to look back in at her. “You finally believe me now, don’t you? You know the folder’s legit.”
Emma fought a smile. “Go to bed, Dan McCarthy.”
As the night wore on, Dan watched from the street-facing window of Mr Byrd’s spare bedroom as a grey car eventually and silently pulled up. Emma stepped out into the now heavy rain and pointed the two well-built men to where she’d found the first bug. Dan assumed that men in this line of work would understand the value of discretion, and he knew that Emma’s firm wouldn’t send people they didn’t trust.
The men took equipment from their vehicle, putting on large headphones and lifting out long devices that looked almost-but-not-quite like the toy metal detector Dan used to have.
One of the men stepped inside Dan’s house and the other began to walk around the side, but Emma called him back. She signalled him to the front door, which Dan took as her telling the man that she wanted to be able to see what both of them were doing at all times. Vigilant as ever, he thought.
Emma then turned towards Dan, who had the light on in Mr Byrd’s spare room. Dan pointed to his house, telling Emma to get out of the lashing rain. She responded by pointing to Dan and putting her hands together beside her ear, telling him to go to sleep. Dan put his light off, and Emma went inside.
Almost an hour later, the two men emerged and put their equipment back in their car, presumably having checked the side and back via the back door. They drove away as quietly as they had arrived. With the rain still lashing, Emma locked Dan’s door and walked across the street. She looked up at his window, which he was still peeking out of, and sent him another go-to-sleep gesture.
Dan didn’t know whether Emma could see him or just knew him well enough to know that he was watching, but she stayed there in the rain as though waiting for him to turn the light on. Instead, he sent her a text: “You’re getting wet.”
She looked up at the window then lifted her phone from her pocket, guarding it from the rain. Dan received a text seconds later which read: “I’m not calling a cab until you go to sleep. Firm’s orders.”
“They didn’t say that,” Dan texted back.
“I work for the firm and I said it. Big day tomorrow. Both of us. Go to sleep, Dan McCarthy!”
As he often did when it came to written communication, Dan struggled to definitively interpret Emma’s tone. But since she was standing in the rain and calling him Dan McCarthy, he correctly assumed it was her playful and sleep-deprived way of saying goodbye. When Dan thought about it, he realised just how little sleep Emma must have been getting. She had been with him almost every waking hour since Friday, and all of the organisational work she was doing had to happen when he was catching what already felt like insufficient sleep.
Keen to get her out of the rain and into a cab, Dan texted again: “Okay. I’m asleep.”
“Good,” Emma replied. She walked away.
Dan smiled and lay down on Mr Byrd’s spare bed. As he did, another text arrived from Emma:
“P.S. Never let that stupid folder out of your sight again. Too close.”
TUESDAY
D minus 59
IDA Headquarters
Colorado Springs, Colorado
“Under the door?” Richard Walker barked into his phone, leaving a furious voicemail reply to the early morning email from Jan Gellar which broke the news that the bugs had been discovered. “Under the goddamn door?”
Richard sat alone in his office, having arrived late in a successful effort to dodge a similar gauntlet of reporters and protestors to the one that had almost left him covered in red paint the previous morning.
“I didn’t ask you to bug McCarthy’s place so that he could come out of it looking like a victim, you idiot. Who did you send, anyway, an amateur? The clean-up is on you. The first thing you’re going to do is fire whatever clown planted the bugs where they could be found. Then you’re going to get to whoever McCarthy is working with at XPR and make sure they understand the consequences of making this public.”
Richard looked out of his window and saw the crowd of reporters thin as they began to accept that they had missed him.
“And if at any point you think about contacting me with more bad news, don’t. Fix it,” he demanded, “or you’re finished.”
D minus 58
Byrd Residence
Birchwood, Colorado
The breaking glass sound of Birchwood’s weekly recycling truck woke Dan unceremoniously just after sunrise on Tuesday morning.
He turned on the TV in Mr Byrd’s spare bedroom and quietly watched the news on ACN, trying to focus on recent developments in an effort to keep the German letter out of his mind for what was now just a matter of hours until the Marco Magnifico show would be over and Clark would be home.
The morning news centred around two main talking points: the Blitz Media drone shot down over Dan’s house, and Timo Fiore’s unprecedented $100,000,000 bounty. Though several commentators disputed the legality of Timo’s offer and questioned whether Billy Kendrick could be liable to prosecution for facilitating it, no one dismissed the vast sum as a publicity stunt; everyone knew Timo was good for it.
Dan could only imagine how much coverage the bugging would get if Emma and XPR decided to release the footage. He muted the TV when the coverage looped back to the drone story after a brief mention of Dan’s appearance on Marco’s show, which ACN couldn’t ignore even though it was happening on a competing station.
After Dan had been awake for an hour but before he had gone downstairs, he heard Mr Byrd’s doorbell. He looked out of the window but saw no car. He was unsurprised to hear Emma’s voice when Mr Byrd answered the door.
“Is Dan still here?” she asked.
Mr
Byrd invited Emma inside and Dan walked downstairs.
What struck Emma about Mr Byrd’s house was that despite being the same shape as Dan’s, the ambiance was almost diametrically opposed. Where Dan’s house was clean and tidy but in need of new furnishings and plenty of handiwork, Mr Byrd’s had thick carpets and working doorhandles but was plagued by dust and clutter.
There were several framed pictures of two girls who Emma assumed to be Mr Byrd’s twin daughters. One of the pictures had been taken on the street and featured Dan and presumably Clark, who at 11 or so looked slightly younger than the girls.
A smell of burnt toast and overly sulphuric eggs filled the air, wafting through from the kitchen. “Would you like some breakfast?” Mr Byrd asked.
“Thanks,” Emma said, “but I already ate.”
“I’ll have some,” Dan said. He and Emma followed Mr Byrd into the kitchen, which followed the house’s pattern by having modern appliances and surfaces caked in crumbs and grease.
Under strict orders to tell no one any more than they needed to know, Emma said very little while Dan and Mr Byrd ate. Dan asked if she had seen that ACN were still talking about the drone, but Emma killed the conversation as subtly as she could. She felt relieved when Mr Byrd then changed the subject, even if his tone was critical.
“I’ve been thinking about this hypnotism thing,” Mr Byrd said, his inflection making clear that the thoughts weren’t positive. “Is it really necessary? Take one look at the TV, read one page of the paper, talk to one person on the street… it seems to me like people are already coming round to this.”
“Doing this shows that we have nothing to hide. It’s Live and Unfiltered,” Emma said, referencing the name of Marco’s show.
Mr Byrd hesitated. “I… I just don’t like it.” He looked across the table to Dan, who was keeping his eyes down and cutting his food into tiny pieces to look busy in an effort to stay out of the conversation. “A hypnotism on live TV is bad enough, but Marco Magnifico? His whole thing is embarrassing people.”
“This is differ—”
“And especially when Clark’s not here. If he was there, at least I’d know Marco wouldn’t get away with going too far.”
Emma looked at Dan, his eyes still down, and wondered if he had told Mr Byrd how soon Clark would be home. “What if you came?” she suggested. “If you can make your own way, I’ll make sure you get in.”
“Okay,” Mr Byrd said. He knew that the live show was being filmed in a small studio in the city, just a short drive away.
Dan looked up from his plate at Mr Byrd. “What do you have planned for the rest of the day?” he asked, as though nothing unusual was going on.
“Phil Norris called me last night. He’d been talking to the Blue Dish guy who’s been camped at the drive-in since Friday. The one who filmed your first interview.”
“Trey,” Dan said.
“I couldn’t tell you his name, but he told Phil that there’s going to be a huge influx of media types into Birchwood today. Apparently there’s been an understanding so far that news crews keep to the area around the drive-in, but he doesn’t expect the new arrivals to be so agreeable. We’re going to put some things in place to make sure the message gets through.”
“Sorry,” Emma said, “who’s going to do this, exactly?”
“Mr Byrd is the head of Birchwood Watch,” Dan answered for him. “He used to be a sheriff’s deputy.”
Emma tilted her head back in a slow and thoughtful half-nod.
“That’s right,” Mr Byrd said. “And Phil said Trey was nothing but helpful. If nothing else, he’s an extra pair of eyes.”
Dan didn’t say anything; by bringing him the calligraphy book and the digital translator, Trey had already been more helpful than anyone else could imagine.
As soon as Dan had finished eating, he thanked Mr Byrd for his hospitality and crossed the street with Emma, folder in hand.
Emma immediately checked the security console for notifications of suspicious movements. Their arrival was the only low-sensitivity trigger. “All clear,” she said, heading straight for the kitchen where she took one of Dan’s Houghton Home Fresh meals and put it in the microwave.
“I thought you already ate?” Dan said.
She shook her head. “So listen, the firm have been talking about tomorrow, and—”
“I’m not listening,” Dan said. “I have enough on my plate today.”
“I know. I was just—”
“Seriously. Every day it’s something else, but I just want to get through today first. Besides, I thought this Marco thing was going to be what finally tipped everything our way?”
Emma nodded. “It’s like advertising: you need to touch people’s consciousness enough times. Tonight you can reach a new audience, and you can totally convince the people who are almost sold. The tomorrow thing is nothing huge, anyway.”
“Good,” Dan said. “So when you were talking to the firm, did they say if they’d decided what to do about the bugs?”
“Let’s just focus on today,” Emma said, turning Dan’s words back on him. The microwave beeped, and she walked over to collect the meal. “I’ve been looking at the SMMA, and the one thing people want is to see you tackling hard questions on live TV.”
“What the hell is SMMA?”
“Social media meta analysis.”
Dan rolled his eyes.
“It’s better than it sounds. Smarter.” Emma handed her phone to Dan with the SMAA app loaded.
“What am I looking at?” he said.
“The Y axis is your Average Aggregate Reach, the X axis is time. The dip yesterday is because we didn’t do much. There’s a tab you can click that annotates major events on the graph. It’s good stuff.”
“It doesn’t work. You can’t know what people really think based on what they write online. People say all sorts of stuff.”
“It’s more sophisticated than you’d think,” Emma said, talking between bites. “It doesn’t just scan for keywords. It knows satire, context, each users’ common phrasing. Everything. It bases the stats on how people react in comments sections below articles and how many times they share or respond to other people’s public posts. Every big media story gets its own engagement figures and each public figure has what they call an OAR — Overall Approval Rating.”
“What’s mine?” Dan asked.
“Improving.”
“And this is accurate?”
“It gauges the public mood better than anything else out there. This is the same framework advertisers use to know what to sell when. It’s the same framework political campaign managers use to measure minute-by-minute reactions and tailor their online presence accordingly.”
“Can I get it on my phone?”
Emma shook her head as she finished chewing. “It’s a subscription that rolls over every twelve months. You don’t want to know how much it costs.”
Dan slid Emma’s phone across the table. “Tell me whenever my approval thing goes up or down,” he said.
“Worrying about that is my job. You just keep doing what you’re doing.”
Playing around with Emma’s phone inspired Dan to lift his own from his pocket and check the flight-tracking app to see where Clark was right now. His flight was on time, and his evening connection looked set to get him home just after midnight.
The kitchen clock said 10:58.
Thirteen hours, Dan thought. Well, if I’ve made it this long…
D minus 57
10 Downing Street
London, England
Despite having only spoken publicly about the IDA leak twice, Prime Minister William Godfrey had succeeded in entrenching the phrase “crucial alien issue” in the British public’s consciousness. His tenacious badgering of President Slater had been generally well received at home, and he knew he had John Cole to thank for deciding to take that route.
Godfrey’s last statement at the Manslow Memorial on Sunday morning went down quite well, but he had sin
ce decided to avoid saying anything else that could be construed as a blunt criticism of the United States for fear of alienating the American public. It would be far more instructive to attack Slater for keeping her electorate in the dark, he suggested, and Cole agreed. The scattergun approach had served its purpose in diverting attention away from the much loathed NHS reforms, but Godfrey knew it was time to be smarter and pickier with his words.
Despite their failure to identify and contact Dan McCarthy’s representatives, there was also now an unspoken understanding between Godfrey and Cole that there might actually be some truth in McCarthy’s story, which Godfrey at first assumed to be a well-researched hoax and which Cole had privately dismissed as the “conveniently timed ramblings of an attention-seeking autist”. These early doubts, shared by countless others, had since steadily diminished with each new development.
In fact, the verified correspondence between Hans Kloster and NASA combined with the American media establishment’s increasingly desperate attempts to pin something on Dan McCarthy gave Godfrey growing hope that he had hit the jackpot by being the first major figure to throw his weight behind what might become the biggest exposé of all time. With this in mind, Godfrey and Cole agreed that it was time to double down.
William Godfrey stepped outside Number Ten to greet the press. Alone, he quickly mentioned in passing that John Cole had been promoted to the role of Deputy Prime Minister and that Diane Logan would no longer be serving in his cabinet. Godfrey didn’t say why, but he didn’t have to; if there was one thing the whole country knew he wouldn’t tolerate, it was subordinates going behind his back like Logan had to Slater.
When two or three voices in the press pack yelled questions about Diane Logan, Godfrey regretted mentioning her at all. With a clear goal of concentrating attention on Slater’s lies and McCarthy’s truth, the last thing he needed was a domestic spat muddying the waters.
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