Not Alone

by Falconer, Craig A.

  “We’re leaving,” Emma said, taking his hand. “Come on.”

  “What happened?” Dan asked Marco.

  “She did,” Marco said. “I guess Real Mommy didn’t care enough to be here, so PR Mommy—”

  Emma took two steps towards Marco Magnifico’s smug face and slapped it with enough stinging force to elicit a collective gasp from the audience. Sporadic cheers and applause soon followed, signs or no signs.

  Mr Byrd, past his prime but still a well-built man, abandoned his losing struggle with the security guard and followed Dan and Emma to the exit they were taking, which was the same door Dan had come through before the start of the show.

  “That was a brave thing you just did,” Mr Byrd said when he caught up with them, intending it primarily for Emma but knowing that it applied to Dan just as much.

  “You should go,” Emma said.

  Mr Byrd nodded. “Come on, Dan.”

  Dan looked at Emma.

  “Go with him,” she said.

  Dan shook his head then turned to Mr Byrd. “I have to get my stuff, anyway. I’ll be home soon.”

  “Okay, well… be careful, son,”

  Dan waved Mr Byrd off down the long, deserted corridor. “Did I say something wrong?” he asked Emma.

  “No,” she said quietly, with none of her usual verve. “You were so good. You did everything we talked about. I’m proud of you.”

  “So why did you come into the shot to stop it?”

  “He was asking the wrong questions. The ones you told me to make sure he didn’t ask.”

  “Couldn’t you have got his producers to tell him to stop?”

  “I did. Twice. They stopped for a break the first time, but that just pissed him off. The second time he just took his earpiece out so they couldn’t talk to him anymore. I ran to the mic and shouted for a break, but he kept going. I didn’t have a choice; I had to come out.”

  “Thanks,” Dan said. “I know that your No Public Association clause means you’re not supposed to be seen with me.”

  “Yeah. There goes the NPA,” Emma sighed. She leaned into the corridor’s wall and slowly slid down against it until her head touched her knees. “Dan… I’m in so much trouble.”

  D minus 53

  White House

  Washington, D.C.

  “I need you to start digging,” President Slater said to Jack Neal, her tireless right-hand man.

  It had been a terrible day for the President, kicking off with William Godfrey’s unforeseen decision to declassify and publish the British government’s extraterrestrial files. Slater had since been informed that those files contained evidence of incidents that no one in any American agencies were familiar with. And as if that wasn’t enough, Dan McCarthy hadn’t crumbled under the pressure of televised hypnosis as everyone had reassured her he would.

  “Digging into what?” Jack asked. He stood at the other side of President Slater’s desk, oblivious to what had happened on Marco Magnifico’s show having been busy playing damage limitation with the British files until Slater summoned him.

  “Ben Gold,” she said.

  “Gold? Really?”

  “He’s been Walker’s number two for years, so he’ll know whatever Walker knows about this damn folder. Walker will never crack, but if you can get to Ben Gold…”

  “Understood,” Jack said. Investigative work had once been his forte and he was glad of the chance to get back into it.

  “And find out as much as you can about her,” President Slater said, swivelling the screen on her desk so Jack could see the freeze-frame of the young woman berating Marco Magnifico live on air. “The show cut right after this.”

  Jack said nothing. He just stood, stunned, staring at the face on the screen.

  “Do you know this person?” Slater asked.

  “That’s Emma Ford,” Jack said, still staring at the confident young woman he once hired straight out of college and had only seen a handful of times in the seven years he’d been away from XPR.

  Slater raised her hands impatiently. “And you know her?”

  “I taught her everything she knows. Has she been with McCarthy the whole time?”

  “You tell me,” Slater yelled, uncharacteristically slamming the desk with her fist. “It’s your job to know these things!”

  Jack nodded quickly, like a child promising to do better next time. “But why is she on screen with McCarthy and the hypnotist? What happened?”

  President Slater skipped the video back to the first time Emma’s voice could be heard. “She didn’t stop any of the tough questions about the folder or his story,” Slater said, “but apparently his family was off limits. It’s almost like she actually believes him.”

  “That might be what she wants you to think,” Jack said, searching for an angle that made more sense than believing Emma thought the folder was real. In any case, he couldn’t help but admire how she had managed to stay unseen while getting McCarthy the kind of TV spots she had.

  And though Jack Neal knew better than anyone what kind of leverage Emma and XPR had against Blitz Media, he could only imagine the kind of deals she must have struck with other media outlets to ensure that her name was never mentioned and her face never shown.

  “Find out,” Slater said. “Find out everything. Forget about Ben Gold for now. I want Emma Ford.”

  D minus 52

  Gravesen Hotel

  Colorado Springs, Colorado

  “Fired,” Emma said as Dan drove the few blocks to her hotel. “By text. I work there for nine years and make them millions of dollars and they fire me by text?”

  “That’s pretty bad.”

  “More like total horseshit! It’s all because my commission rate was grandfathered into my contract before the new bosses arrived, and they can’t bear the fact that I make more money than them most years. They’ve wanted rid of me for so long, but they needed an excuse. They never even believed you, you know.”

  This didn’t surprise Dan as much as Emma seemed to expect.

  “They sent me all this way,” she continued, still ranting, “and then when I pushed for a retaliation against Blitz they said you “weren’t worth the trouble” because you would trip over your own story before long. They threatened to call me back if you didn’t do those ads, they didn’t even want to shell out for the security cameras, and they were angry that I set up the Timo thing on my own. They never believed you for a minute.”

  “When did you start believing my story?” Dan asked. He couldn’t help it; there hadn’t really been a clearly defined turning point in his client-agent relationship with Emma, but they had definitely come a long way from the moment she showed up at his doorstep on Friday night.

  “Sunday,” she said without missing a beat. “Early in the morning, when the news came out about Kloster’s letter to NASA. It was too much like the documents you found to be a coincidence, and everyone I spoke to said there was no way you could have seen that letter and faked others to look like it.”

  Dan bit his lip about the other Kloster letter; there were now only a few hours until Clark was due home, and though Emma had well and truly won his trust, Dan had made a promise to his brother. He parked the car across the street from the Gravesen Hotel’s imposing front entrance. “So will I see you tomorrow, or…?”

  “Tonight isn’t finished,” Emma said. “Could you wait here for two minutes?”

  “Sure.”

  Dan watched Emma walk across to the hotel and enter through the glass doors. He couldn’t see her expression as she stood at the reception desk, but he could see her animated hands. After much less than two minutes, she returned to the car.

  “Is everything okay?” Dan asked, though “what’s wrong?” would have been more appropriate.

  “Could you drive me to another ATM? Theirs charges $5, and I’m not giving them a penny more than I have to.”

  Dan obliged, of course, but wondered aloud why Emma suddenly needed cash. She explained that both of her
credit cards were linked to the firm and had already been cut off. And even though the firm had been charged in advance for the coming night, a valid charge account was needed to cover the deposit for things like incidental damage.

  “But if your credit cards have been cut off…”

  “I’ve got a debit card for my expenses account. There’s hardly anything in it, so I’m hoping they won’t have got round to locking me out yet.”

  “Couldn’t the hotel take the debit card?” Dan asked.

  “That’s what I said, but they were worried about it being cut off. Can’t blame them, I guess. None of this is their fault.”

  “So how much cash do you need?”

  “$1,200.”

  “For a deposit? Is the room made of diamonds?”

  Dan’s incredulity made Emma smile. “It’s a junior suite.”

  “How much is the senior suite?”

  “There is no senior suite,” Emma said, not sure whether Dan was being serious. “Stop, ATM. Over there.”

  Dan’s car screeched to a halt. Fortunately, it was a sufficiently mundane vehicle to avoid being recognised as his. Emma managed to reach the ATM without any more attention than someone in such a glamorous dress would normally receive, too, given that so little time had passed since her soon-to-be-headline-news interruption and slapping of Marco Magnifico.

  She returned to the car quickly, protectively clutching a handful of banknotes. “Stupid daily limit. I could only get $4,000.”

  “Only?”

  “$2,800 after the deposit. And they said the room is $600. So, what’s that, four nights?”

  Dan focused on the road ahead, disbelieving that any room — junior suite or not — could cost so much. “You’re not paying $600 for somewhere to sleep,” he eventually said in a flat tone. “You can stay at mine.”

  “Seriously?” Emma said, like she genuinely hadn’t considered this as an option. “How much?”

  “Nothing, obviously. I’m not running a hotel. And it’s not like you’re a stranger.”

  “Does anyone ever tell you that you’re too nice for your own good?”

  “You mean apart from Clark, my dad, the psychiatrist…?”

  Emma laughed as she stepped out of the car again, back at the hotel to collect her things.

  Dan listened to the radio while he waited, catching the end of an old country song about a man and his boots. He didn’t much care for the tune, but the lyrics of the chorus jumped out at him:

  “So while you’re out there in them old boots,

  running from your rags to riches;

  Spare a free thought for the dead man,

  who gave them boots their stitches.”

  D minus 51

  IDA Headquarters

  Colorado Springs, Colorado

  Richard Walker sat smiling at his desk with Ben Gold, long after most of the IDA’s staff had left for the day. Having watched Dan McCarthy’s interview on Marco Magnifico’s show end abruptly with an unplanned walk on from his XPR rep, Richard felt better than he had an hour earlier.

  “Why is XPR such a big deal, anyway?” Ben asked, curious as to why Richard seemed so pleased when it looked to him like McCarthy had stuck to his story unnervingly well.

  “There are things you don’t know, Benjamin. Things you don’t need to know.”

  Ben correctly took Richard cracking his knuckles as a suggestion that it was time to leave. “See you tomorrow, sir.”

  “Big day,” Richard mused as Ben walked across the office.

  Ben pulled the door open, noticing with some concern that it wasn’t properly closed. His concern grew when he saw Richard’s new favourite security guard, Raúl, standing right outside.

  “How long have you been here?” Ben asked, closing the door fully and keeping his voice down to avoid alerting Richard. “Have you been listening?”

  “No, Mr Gold. No, no. This is where Mr Walker asked me to stand. He told me to walk the corridor every ten minutes and stand here the rest of the time.”

  “Did you hear anything?” Ben asked.

  “I just got back to the door,” Raúl insisted, his voice pleading innocence. “The first thing I heard was Mr Walker saying that there are things you don’t know.”

  “Good,” Ben said. He patted Raúl on the shoulder before walking away. “Stay alert.”

  “Always, Mr Gold. For you and Mr Walker, always.”

  D minus 50

  McCarthy Residence

  Birchwood, Colorado

  Dan helped Emma carry her things into his bedroom, where she would be sleeping; Clark’s room would soon be occupied, their father’s was out of the question, and Dan didn’t want to make Emma sleep on the couch.

  “Where did the cheque for your Vostok article go?” Emma asked, noticing the space where the frame used to be, which was a fresher white than the yellowing paint everywhere else. “Did you take it down before the camera people came?”

  Dan shook his head. “I had to cash it on Saturday.”

  “Why?”

  “I needed the money.”

  Emma didn’t ask what for; she was too busy feeling guilty about all the money she and the firm had made from Dan’s name while he was forced to cash the cheque he had described as worth more to him than the money he could swap it for. The $4,000 cash in her purse didn’t make it any easier.

  For his part, Dan was glad she didn’t press for details. He opened the door to his bedroom and placed Emma’s suitcase on the bed. “So what happens with the camera footage now that you’re not with XPR? Do you think we should release it?”

  “Definitely,” Emma said. “The firm didn’t want a war with Blitz, but the firm don’t have a say anymore. We should do it soon, while we have everyone’s attention on the back of the show. Speaking of which, can you remember anything you said to Marco when you were under?”

  “Not really. I remember him saying “extremely relaxed” and then nothing else until he counted up to five. How long was that?”

  “Fifteen minutes, maybe. But it was good. Trust me. You sounded like someone who was telling the truth, and Marco being such a relentless asshole towards the end will have made millions of people take your side. And a sympathy vote is still a vote.”

  “What did he actually say that made you step in? I know you said he was asking the wrong questions, but what questions?”

  “Stuff about you being an attention seeker, about not having any friends, about your parents. He was pissed off at being told what to not say so he just said all of it. Do you want to watch it?”

  “Later,” Dan said. “I’m going to work on something for Clark coming home. It’s easier if I do it in my room, so can you maybe watch TV or something?”

  “Is your brother going to be okay with me being here?” Emma asked, relieving Dan by again neglecting to push for details and thus saving him the trouble of avoiding the topic of the letter he was finally about to translate.

  “He will be when I tell him how much you’ve helped me.”

  Emma nodded unsurely. “Is it okay if I get something to eat?

  “Sure.”

  “Do you want anything?”

  “Not right now,” Dan said, “I have to get on with this.” He closed the door and quietly locked it.

  * * *

  After feeding his fish and settling his mind by watching them for a few minutes as he so often did, Dan got to work.

  He opened the word document in which he had transcribed the near-impenetrable German letter and continued translating it word by word and sentence by sentence on the device Trey had purchased. Dan hadn’t thought much about Trey in the last few days, but he owed him a lot; not just for delivering the translator and the book, but also for keeping the news of the game-changing letter’s existence to himself.

  Trey was the only person Dan had told before he promised Clark to keep his mouth shut, and he had done as good a job as Dan of keeping the secret.

  The content of the letter made more sense when Dan e
ntered entire sentences into the portable translator. As he moved through the document, he grew more and more excited. The level of detail, not to mention the nature of that detail, was far beyond anything he had hoped for.

  The first part of the letter provided illuminating context: addressed to Hans Kloster’s brother, the letter was a full confession of everything Hans knew about the incident at Lake Toplitz, written shortly after he was diagnosed with a then-incurable wasting disease.

  “You should see this,” Dan heard Emma call from the living room, around an hour after he started translating. The words could have been his own.

  Dan walked through and stopped dead on the spot when he saw the headline on the TV: “Death Toll Reaches Nine In Latest “Alien” Tragedy.”

  “What’s going on?” he asked, fearing the answer.

  “It’s a cargo cult somewhere in India,” Emma said. “The leader, a really old guy in ceremonial robes, went into a village and tried to talk people into “saving” their children by sending them to join the cult, who apparently are the only people who’ll be spared when the aliens come. Someone stabbed the old guy in the heart, and the cult basically razed the village to avenge him.”

  Dan kept his eyes on the TV, which was tuned to an English-language Russian news station. “What does it mean by latest alien tragedy?” he eventually asked, fearing this answer even more than the last.

  “That’s the thing: everything seems to have kicked off today. There was a riot in Brazil after the police fired at protestors outside the US embassy, and someone in Turkey shot his whole family and recorded a video suicide-note saying he did it to protect them from the aliens. They’re saying it’s Godfrey’s fault for talking about it.”

  “He’s only talking about it because of me,” Dan said, taking no pleasure from the words.

  Dan then listened as the Russian news station’s American reporter suggested that this was “only the beginning of the global chaos that will ensue should Washington follow London’s lead and reveal all.” The reporter made the now-familiar distinction between Godfrey’s small-d disclosure and the potential capital-D Disclosure that could come from Slater.