“I’m not saying I believe McCarthy,” the reporter continued, “but perhaps it’s time he realised that some doors shouldn’t be kicked down.”
The worst-case scenario that the reporter then painted — one of burning cities and escalating conflicts in the aftermath of an announcement about potentially hostile aliens — struck Dan as overly pessimistic. Deep down, though, he felt that the truth likely lay somewhere between these unnerving predictions and Billy Kendrick’s forecast of sunshine and rainbows.
“What are Blitz and ACN saying about this stuff?” Dan asked.
“Nothing. Blitz have been focusing on me and ACN have been talking about the British files and your interview. It’s like the rest of the world doesn’t exist.” Emma briefly flicked over to Blitz News, which displayed a typically clickbait-like headline: “7 things you need to know about Emma Ford RIGHT NOW!” Back on the Russian station, grisly footage from the Indian tragedy filled the screen.
Dan watched it silently.
“Don’t beat yourself up,” Emma said, reading the thoughts behind his downbeat expression. “Things like this were bound to—”
The sound of Emma’s phone vibrating on the couch cut her off.
“I should take this,” she said, standing up with her phone in her hand.
“Who is it?”
“Uh, Tara. My sister. I should really take it.”
“Okay,” Dan said. “I’ll get back to… the thing I’m working on.”
Emma ignored Dan’s vague language and headed for the back door to take the call outside, because the name on her phone’s screen was not Tara Ford.
Troublingly, but not unexpectedly, the name was Jack Neal.
D minus 49
White House
Washington, D.C.
Jack Neal paced the length of his windowless office over and over again, hoping and waiting for Emma to pick up.
“What?” she said, catching him off-guard when he was almost ready to give up.
Having recruited her into the world of PR and mentored her for two years, Jack had something of a soft spot for Emma; despite there being just seven years between them, she had once felt like the closest thing to a daughter the unmarried and childless man would ever have, and he still felt irrationally protective of her even now.
Emma, on the other hand, rarely thought of Jack. She appreciated what he had done for her, but it was just business. On the few occasions they had been in the same room since Jack’s departure from XPR, the firm he founded, she had shown few signs of fondness.
“Listen, Emma…”
“What do you want?”
“Can you talk?” Jack asked. He sat down.
Emma looked around. There was no one else on the street and Dan’s windows were all closed. “Make it quick.”
“You really believe McCarthy’s story, don’t you?”
“So do you,” Emma said.
“What makes you say that?”
“Slater asked you to call me. She knows the game’s up.”
Jack took a deep breath. “This is me talking to you as a friend, okay? This isn’t spin, so listen to what I’m saying: President Slater doesn’t know anything about this Kerguelen folder or anything in it.”
“Of course she doesn’t.”
“Think about it,” Jack pleaded. “If the President had anything to do with the files McCarthy leaked, do you really think he’d still have them four days later? You really think he’d be talking about them to the media?”
“Seizing the folder or coming after Dan would be political suicide,” Emma retorted. “An explicit admission of guilt. You and Slater know that as well as I do.”
“Emma… whatever this thing is or isn’t, she’s not in on it. How sure are you that McCarthy hasn’t served up the greatest hoax of all time?”
“Do you live under a rock? The Australian letter is real, Kloster sent a letter to NASA that’s just like the ones in the folder, and the Billy Kendrick thing makes perfect sense. Remember when you first uncovered what Blitz was doing with the illegal surveillance and harassment? The targets read like a list of the most powerful people in the country… plus Billy Kendrick. Now we know why. He had just started talking about a government cover-up, and someone didn’t like it.”
“But Richard Walker was on the list, too. If he had anything to do with Blitz spying on Kendrick, why would they be spying on him?”
“I didn’t say I had all the answers,” Emma said after a few seconds of fruitless thought. “The point is, the files aren’t made up. It’s not like I’m just taking Dan’s word for it. And trust me, I didn’t come here expecting to start believing in aliens. The firm sent me to get what I could before his story fell apart, but it just keeps getting stronger.”
Jack sighed audibly. “You’ve read his schoolwork. His lifelong goal was proving that aliens are real. How many kids think like that? How many people have goals like that?”
“He’s not like other people. On Friday night he was too shy to look me in the eye, and tonight he agreed to be hypnotised by an asshole on live TV. What does that tell you? He hates the press and the makeup, he said no to $50,000 for a two-hour ad shoot, and he did everything he could to leak the files anonymously. All of this media attention isn’t fun for him, Jack. Sometimes it’s felt like I’ve had to drag him out of his house.”
“What are you telling me?”
“That he’s not lying! Have you ever considered that maybe Slater didn’t want to share the biggest secret in the world with her PR rep?”
“I’m her senior presidential advisor,” Jack said through gritted teeth. “I know more about Valerie Slater than she knows about herself. And when something needs to be cleaned up, I’m the only one she turns to. That’s why I’m here. So however sure you are that McCarthy isn’t lying, I’m twice as sure that Valerie has nothing to do with this.”
“Someone’s lying,” Emma insisted, “and I’m telling you it’s not Dan.”
“You’ve only known him for four days.”
“I know a liar when I see one, Jack. If you taught me anything, it was that.”
Jack closed his eyes and wracked his mind. “Let’s pretend we’re both right,” he said, almost groaning. “For the sake of argument.”
“Go on…”
“President Slater wants info on two people: you and Walker’s number two. His name is Ben Gold. Have you done any digging on him?”
“Dan doesn’t think Gold is in on it,” Emma said. “He said Gold has spent his career searching for habitable exoplanets and alien signals. Apparently he’s even published proposals for the kinds of signals we should be sending into space. He just doesn’t fit. He’s the total opposite of a good fit.”
“And who got Timo Fiore involved? Was that you or Kendrick?”
“No comment.”
“Emma, soliciting treason or espionage or whatever this would be is not a joke.”
“I know,” she said flatly. “And I’m sure whoever did it knows that, too. But if there’s no cover-up then there’s nothing else to be leaked, right?”
“Listen to me,” Jack begged. “You don’t understand how deep this could go. If Walker and whoever he’s working with really have been hiding this since the first date on those documents, they’re not just going to roll over. If this is a governmental thing from before Valerie’s time then you could end up in serious trouble. But if it’s not — if Walker is in with some kind of shadow agency or private group — you might already be in physical danger.”
“What are you talking about, shadow agency? What do you know?”
“Nothing. Honestly. But if this isn’t the government’s secret to keep, then whose the hell is it?”
Emma hadn’t given this much thought, and she didn’t see any point in starting now. “Who cares? Who cares who Walker is working with? If it’s a government secret, Timo’s reward will flush it out. Walker had the folder either way, and I can prove it. We can run fingerprints or DNA or whatever. And remember
the spheres that the folder talks about? Once we prove the folder is real, the whole world is going to be looking for them. No amount of spin can deny physical evidence like that.”
“You need to get yourself out of this while you can,” Jack said. He stood up and started pacing his office once more. “Whatever the hell this actually is, you need to get out of it.”
Emma knew that Jack would be assuming she was recording the call — in their line of work, this was rule one — so she took his advice as a sign of genuine concern. Given that he had been candid throughout and his thoughts were more jumbled than coherent, Emma got the sense that Jack, like her, really was trying to figure out what was going on. She didn’t say anything.
“McCarthy is already in way too deep,” Jack continued, “but you can still get out if you leave now. You have to leave now.”
“I’m not going anywhere.”
“Emma, you’re not think—”
“I appreciate the concern, Jack, but you’re not my boss. Not anymore.”
Jack ruffled his hair in sheer frustration. He tried to compose his voice. “Remember your first day at XPR, when I told you that stubbornness could be your friend or your enemy? Right now, it’s not your friend, Emma. It’s not your friend.”
“Do you remember what else you told me on my first day?” Emma asked in return, taking him by surprise.
“Remind me.”
“You can hide the truth forever, but the lie always gets out.”
Jack Neal had nothing to say in response.
Emma ended the call and went back inside.
D minus 48
McCarthy Residence
Birchwood, Colorado
Emma watched the Blitz News coverage of her “violent attack” on Marco Magnifico out of morbid curiosity. There had so far been no comment from XPR, any former clients, or any of the countless public figures she had privately clashed with over the years. She liked to think that people knew better; even if she no longer had the backing of a global behemoth like XPR, she still had almost a decade’s worth of life-destroying dirt on more high-profile individuals than she could count.
The Blitz News anchor for this “unbiased” segment was Sarah Curtis. Sarah had enjoyed the good fortune of being on air with Billy Kendrick when Richard Walker first responded to the leak on Friday afternoon, and she had fronted much of the Blitz coverage since. Emma took solace in the fact that Sarah and her colleagues wouldn’t be laughing in the morning, when the news of a Blitz Media employee bugging Dan’s house belatedly came out.
Emma had already considered her options in regards to the bugging like a chess player, factoring in what everyone else would be thinking and taking care to plan several steps ahead. Her former employers at XPR knew about the bugging, but they had explicitly insisted that Dan wasn’t worth starting a war with Blitz over, so Emma saw little chance of them revealing anything. She likewise doubted that they would give Blitz a heads-up that they had been caught; however acrimonious Emma’s split with XPR was, the firm’s years of simmering antagonism with Blitz rendered any such courtesy all but inconceivable.
When Emma felt that enough time had passed to broach the issues raised by Jack Neal’s phone call without raising suspicion over the call itself, she rose from the couch and knocked on Dan’s bedroom door.
Dan came to the door, barely opening it. His eyes, looking flustered, greeted Emma at the side of the door.
“Are you hiding a girl in there or something?” Emma asked with a smile.
Dan’s silence suggested that the joke had fallen flat.
“Are you okay?”
“What do you need?” Dan asked. He deliberately said need rather than want, assuming that Emma wouldn’t bother him with anything that wasn’t urgent.
“I was just wondering something. Do you think…”
“Do I think what?” Dan said, quickly impatient.
“Never mind. It’s stupid.” Emma turned away.
Dan opened the door further and slipped out, closing it right behind him. “Tell me.”
“Okay,” Emma said. Her eyes rested low, which Dan tagged as unusual for someone who normally made unflinching eye contact in all situations. “Do you think there’s any chance that Slater doesn’t know?”
“About what?”
“Everything. Walker’s folder, Kloster’s letter to NASA, the whole thing.”
Dan looked at Emma’s eyes, which still didn’t meet his own. “Do you know something I don’t?”
“I told you it was stupid.”
“It’s not stupid at all.”
Emma finally looked up at Dan. “Really?”
“Presidents never know more than they have to,” Dan said. “Think about how many presidents Richard Walker has outlasted. If this is his secret to keep, why would he tell them?”
“You really think he could hide it from a president?”
Dan nodded confidently. “A guy like Walker… well, that’s the point: there isn’t another guy like Walker. If he’s dedicated the last thirty years of his life to suppressing this thing, which I think he has, he could easily have kept it from Slater and anyone else he didn’t want to find out. It makes sense. This secret could be why he agreed to take the IDA job when he could have made another run for the White House. And Billy said that Hans Kloster lobbied hard for Walker to get the job in the first place, so it all fits together.”
Emma didn’t yet pick up that Dan knew something she didn’t — something gathered from his ongoing translation of the German letter — but she took a deep breath and decided to tell Dan what had first raised the Slater question in her mind. “That phone call wasn’t from my sister,” she admitted, now back in the familiar habit of maintaining almost overbearing eye contact. “It was from Jack Neal.”
“How and why does Jack Neal have your phone number?” Dan asked. Of all the questions Emma’s revelation raised, this somehow found itself at the front of the queue.
“He hired me at XPR. It was his firm until he cashed out and went into politics. I’ve only seen him a few times since then, but I still have his number and he has mine.”
“So what did he want?” Dan prodded, quickly getting to the more important questions. “Did he tell you to stop digging before you get hurt?”
Emma nodded, looking unnaturally vulnerable. “He thinks Walker could be working with a shadow agency to keep this quiet. He swore to me that Slater doesn’t know. I know you’ll think I’m crazy for believing him, but I don’t think he was lying.”
“There’s no shadow agency,” Dan said definitively. “It’s just Walker and maybe a few others.”
“Ben Gold?”
“I doubt it. He’s a scientist, not a politician.”
Emma accepted that without too much difficulty, but she didn’t understand how Dan could be so confident about the rest. “What makes you so sure there’s no shadow agency?”
“Just because,” Dan said, more surely than his choice of words suggested. “The only thing I never agreed with Billy on was his obsession with Disclosure. I thought the confirmation event was more likely to be a random civilian discovery or a deliberate message in the sky. I always kind of thought a cover-up was too far-fetched because it’s just like the critics have been saying about the leak: too many people would have to know. And the bigger the number of people who know, the bigger the chance that one of them lets slip. So I reckon we’re either dealing with a tiny political group or a tiny private group, but not the whole government and not a shadow agency. Walker might have used IDA projects as covers or diversions, but the low-level staff won’t know. He didn’t get where he is by trusting more people than he has to.”
“So Jack isn’t lying?”
“Why did you lie about the phone call, anyway?” Dan asked, ignoring Emma’s question in favour of his own. “Before you picked up, why did you say it was your sister?”
Emma hesitated. “I don’t know. Just because I didn’t know what Jack was going to say, I guess.”
In the near-symmetrical context of the secret letter Dan was halfway through translating, he couldn’t reasonably hold this against her. “I should finish what I’m doing,” he said.
“What are you doing?” Emma asked, finally forcing Dan to think of an answer.
“Reading something about Kloster,” Dan said, satisfying his conscience that omission was better than an outright lie. “I’ll be as quick as I can.”
* * *
Later in the night, and very near the end of the letter, Dan heard the front door open. He looked at the time in the corner of his screen: 03:53.
Dan jumped out of his seat smiling. He had been so busy translating the longer-than-it-looked letter that he’d temporarily forgotten about Clark being due home several hours earlier.
In the living room, the sudden movement woke Emma from her restful sleep. She turned away from the TV and saw a huge presence standing in the doorway with a large holdall bag slung over one shoulder. She then turned instinctively to Dan’s door when it opened, before flitting her eyes between the two brothers as though she was watching a game of tennis. Dan’s height had surprised Emma on their first meeting, but the difference in his posture compared to Clark’s now made him appear no taller than average. The brothers were in fact almost exactly the same height, but Emma would never have believed it.
The soft notes of Emma’s perfume filled the air, indicating her presence before Clark’s eyes confirmed the suspicion.
As Clark flicked the light on and walked towards Dan after a brief and unfriendly glance in Emma’s direction, the image her mind conjured was of two goldfish in the same undersized bowl, with the dominant one much larger than the other. Clark was broader than Dan to the point that it almost didn’t make sense, and he carried himself like he had something worth carrying.
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