Dan saw the way Clark looked at Emma — like she was dirt on his shoe — but was too glad to see him to take much notice.
“Are you okay?” Clark asked as he met Dan midway across the room. His voice was considerably deeper than Dan’s — almost husky — and seemed to fit with his prematurely receding hairline.
Dan nodded wordlessly.
Clark patted him hard on the shoulder. There were no hugs or embraces, which somehow both surprised Emma and didn’t.
“Good,” Clark said. “I’ve been trying to get through to you all night.”
Dan lifted his phone from his pocket and saw five missed calls. “I forgot to take it off silent,” he said.
Clark shrugged then removed his holdall from his shoulder. “Can you dump this on my bed?” he asked, handing it to Dan.
Emma watched as Dan took the bag, which appeared to be a thousand times heavier than he expected; what had looked like nothing in Clark’s hands now seemed to be filled with lead.
With Dan walking to Clark’s room, Clark headed back to the front door and opened it. Rather than step outside to pick up another bag, as Emma had expected him to, Clark held the door open and looked straight at her.
“Get the fuck out of my house.”
Dan, hearing the words, dropped Clark’s bag with a thud. “What are you doing?”
“Now,” Clark said, ignoring Dan and tilting his head towards the dark street.
Emma stood up.
“You don’t have to go anywhere,” Dan said. He turned to Clark. “You don’t understand. You don’t know anything about—”
“It’s all over the news,” Clark interrupted. “She’s all over the news. I know who she is and I know who she works for.”
“Worked,” Dan contended. “She lost her job for stopping the hypnotism.”
“The hypnotism that was her latest idea to make money off your name?”
Emma stood at the couch; silently, awkwardly, impotently.
“Clark, she didn’t make me do it.”
“But it was her idea, wasn’t it? It was her fault you got embarrassed like that, wasn’t it? Look at what she’s wearing! She was dressed for TV. You’re being played.”
Dan looked over at Emma, still in the anomalously glamorous blue and black dress. There was a perfectly good reason why she looked so chic tonight of all nights, but they both knew that Clark wasn’t interested in hearing it.
“Her whole job is getting people to trust her,” Clark continued. “She probably would have got me, too.”
“She’s on my side! I don’t even want to think about where I’d be if she wasn’t.”
“How about not being made to look like a total dick on live TV?”
“Dan,” Emma said, breaking her silence. “Maybe he’s right. I should—”
“No. There’s something you have to see,” Dan said. “Sit down for a few minutes. And Clark, go into your room and unpack your stuff. Please. Five minutes.”
Clark breathed deeply and closed the front door. He walked slowly across the room, stopping as he passed Emma at the couch. “You’re a fucking snake,” he hissed.
Whether it was the language or the slight on her character, Emma took strong and immediate exception to these words. To Dan’s disbelief, she walked around the couch and squared up to Clark.
Emma looked up at Clark, her forehead barely reaching his shoulders. “I’m a what?” she challenged.
“Fucking. Snake.”
Dan had seen Clark lose his temper too many times to count, abandoning words for fists and inevitably making a mess of whoever stepped on his toes. It wasn’t so much that Clark had grown up with a short fuse as it was that he didn’t have a fuse at all; when something annoyed him, he hit it. Clark’s days in the army had knocked most of the insolence out of him and taught him to control and channel his anger, but as Dan saw the intensity build in Clark’s eyes he worried that those days were now too far in the past to have any bearing on the present.
But as the equally riled up Emma refused to back down, Dan knew deep down that Clark wouldn’t touch her even if he found himself on the wrong end of the same kind of stinging slap that Marco Magnifico had endured earlier in the night. Henry McCarthy had instilled the “never hit a woman” rule so strongly that the only time Clark ever laid serious hands on Dan was when 8-year-old Dan pushed an older girl during a kickball game outside their house.
Even without such concrete assurances, Emma held her ground. “At least this snake was here for him,” she said caustically.
Dan stepped in to physically prise them apart. He tried to reason with Clark, who he saw as the cause of the problem. “I’m only asking you for five minutes,” he said. “Please.”
“Tell her to stay out of my face,” Clark said as he backed up.
“Tell me yourself,” Emma pushed.
Dan led Clark away by the arm. “Just unpack your stuff,” he said when they reached Clark’s door, which was just to the left of Dan’s.
“Where the hell’s your cheque?” Clark asked, spotting the whiter square of paint where the frame had been. “Don’t tell me you’ve been paying her?”
Emma started to answer, but Dan held his hand up to stop her. “I needed the $85 to buy the thing I’m using right now. Ask Phil from the pawn shop. I cashed it on Saturday night.”
Clark dropped the point, shot a parting look at Emma, and slammed his bedroom door behind him.
“Don’t leave,” Dan pleaded to Emma from outside his own room. “Whatever he says, don’t leave.”
* * *
Dan had only six lines left to translate. The letter seemed to be winding down into a farewell, but he had to keep going in case there was anything new to go on top of the incredible revelations he’d already uncovered.
With three lines left, Dan’s concentration was broken by the sound of a door opening and Clark’s voice booming: “How much money have you made off him since Friday?”
Dan tried to maintain his focus.
“The firm makes the money,” Emma replied, calmly but firmly.
“Don’t give me that,” Clark shouted, using the exact tone and words their father had resorted to in countless arguments over the years.
The shouting reminded Dan of being a child; of his parents arguing in that same living room while he hid in this same bedroom, only back then Clark had been in there with him covering his ears, not outside stoking the argument’s flames. Back then Clark would always reassure Dan that the fight wasn’t about him, but Dan had no such consolation this time.
“You’ve been parading him around like a circus animal,” Clark yelled. Dan was glad that it at least sounded like Clark was standing in his doorway rather than at Emma’s area by the couch. “You’re the agent they sent to—”
“Rep,” Emma interrupted.
Clark shrugged, more with his palms than his shoulders. “You’re the fucking rep they sent to talk him into all this shit. What was it worth to you?”
“It wasn’t like that.”
“How much would it have been for tonight?” Clark pushed.
“I said it wasn’t like that.”
“How… much?”
“Thirty,” Emma muttered under her breath, too quietly for Dan to hear.
“Thirty grand?!”
Dan heard this. He didn’t really mind; in a way he was glad that it wasn’t an insulting amount, and Emma had been quite upfront with him that she would get “a good commission” for the live TV appearance as soon as she first brought it up.
“Was it worth it?” Clark asked. “Was it worth embarrassing him in front of millions of people?”
“I didn’t know Marco was going to turn on him,” Emma insisted. There was no anger in her voice now, only a shaky kind of guiltless regret. “Dan knows that. He knows I’m sorry.”
“Everyone’s sorry when they get caught.”
“How did I get caught?” Emma snapped, shifting back towards anger at Clark’s incessant if understandable accusation
s. “In what world does going out in front of the cameras and throwing that money away to protect him equate to getting caught? Ask the guy across the street, Mr Byrd. He was there. He’s been here the whole time, trying to protect Dan when someone else was nowhere to be seen.”
Dan gave up any pretence of being able to concentrate with this going on outside his door. Emma, normally the most in-control person Dan had ever known, sounded almost hysterical. He felt responsible for giving her the false expectation that Clark would be grateful for what she had done, which had led to these accusations catching her completely off guard.
Having heard enough, Dan reluctantly opened his door again.
“Shut up!” he yelled, even though no one was talking at the time. “Both of you. I asked for five minutes, and you can’t even give me that?”
Neither said anything.
“Look, it doesn’t matter where you’ve been or how you got here,” Dan said, motioning to Clark and then Emma. “We’re all here now and we’re all on the same side, okay? I’m trying to finish something but all I can hear is you two arguing over nothing.”
Clark, standing much nearer to Dan than Emma was, tried to look past Dan into his room. “What are you doing in there, anyway?”
“The thing I told you about. Remember, the thing you told me not to tell anyone else about?”
Clark slowly tipped his chin upwards in understanding.
“What thing?” Emma asked whoever was listening.
Dan held up three fingers. “Three minutes. If you have to ignore him, ignore him. Just don’t leave, okay?”
“Okay,” Emma said.
* * *
Slightly more than three minutes later, Emma heard the sound of a printer in operation.
“What’s he printing?” she called to Clark, who was now in the kitchen.
Clark stood still to listen for the printer. He walked back through the opening into the living room. “I don’t know what it is,” he said. “Did he tell you anything about… anything?”
“Like what?” Emma said. She stood up and walked into the kitchen.
Clark joined her at the table. His next question came quietly enough that Dan wouldn’t have heard it even without the printer: “Do you believe him?”
Emma held Clark’s eyes and nodded.
“Since when? And don’t say the beginning. I didn’t even believe him on Friday.”
Emma allowed herself to smile. “Definitely not Friday. At first I thought he had some kind of autistic thing that makes him able to lie with a straight face.”
“Opposite,” Clark said. “A blind man could see a lie in Dan’s eyes, and he’s not autistic.”
The printer stopped printing, causing Emma to lower her voice even further than she had already. “But he’s definitely something, right?”
“He’s the smartest person I know,” Clark said.
“Well yeah, but—”
“But, yeah, he’s not exactly “people smart”. When it comes to people, how can I put this… he sometimes trusts the wrong ones.”
“I’ve never lied to him,” Emma said defensively. “I’ve never taken advantage of him. He knew I didn’t believe him at first. I told him straight that we were on the same side for different reasons; that he wanted people to believe him and that my job was to get his truth in front of a wide audience and protect him from people who were trying to silence it. That’s all I’ve ever done.”
“So when did you start believing him?” Clark asked, returning to his previous question.
“Sunday. When Kloster’s letter to NASA—”
“Same.” Clark interrupted. He was good at interrupting. “The Kloster things is the—”
This time, the interruption came from Dan.
“Okay,” he said as he opened his door and walked towards the kitchen, too focused on the dynamite evidence in his hands to take any notice of the fact that Emma and Clark were sitting near each other and talking civilly.
“Is that it?” Clark asked
Emma stared at the printouts. There were two piles of double-sided sheets. “What is it?”
“There was something else in the Kerguelen folder,” Dan said. “It’s big.”
“What did you just say?” Emma asked. She sat bolt upright.
Dan held out the envelope containing the original handwritten letter. “I didn’t leak this with everything else, and no one knows I found it. I just got through translating it from German, so some parts might be clunky. It’s not too bad, though, because the thing has a “literality” setting and I changed it to very low so it would smooth the English out as much it could without losing too much accuracy. We can retranslate on the high setting later if you want; I just needed to do it quickly tonight. I needed to know what it was.”
“So what is it?” Clark asked. The presence of an unreleased document wasn’t news to him, but its nature remained a mystery.
“A confession,” Dan said. “Dated 1988, signed by Hans Kloster, addressed to his brother Wilhelm.”
Emma held out her hand to receive the printouts. “What does it say?” she asked impatiently.
“Everything,” Dan smiled, flashing teeth. “Absolutely everything.”
Part 3
The Letter
“Power is not a means; it is an end.”
George Orwell
D minus 47
Dearest Wilhelm,
I hope these words find you in better health than they leave me. You surely know by now that my days are short, and that is why I have written this letter. For even though we have lived such different and isolated lives, I can trust no one else.
Never did I wish to burden you with this knowledge, brother, but I have no one else to turn to.
I have guarded a great secret for over four decades. The burden was not always mine alone, but I can count on my fingers the other men who knew the whole story. None of them lived to see 1946. It would serve no purpose to name them, but suffice to say they would likely be among those named by a layman asked to state the most prominent party officials.
The purpose of this letter is not to ease my conscience by burdening yours. This secret is unfortunately not of the kind which can safely die with its last keeper, for the secret is the existence of an alien artefact which was reluctantly discarded in the Atlantic Ocean, perilously close to a concentrated population base.
I well understand the difficulty you may face in believing these words, and I endured the journey to this convention to place this letter in your hands with that in mind. If nothing else, you know these words are mine.
I cannot stress strongly enough that the rediscovery of the artefact and its contents would destroy everything we have both worked for, be it in Bonn or Washington. Such an event would be a disaster, its only winners the SED and KPdSU. In simple terms: knowledge of a non-human threat from above would be used as justification for a central world government; for redistributing wealth from west to east; for eliminating our well-earned economic and military advantages.
I will waste no more of your time with context. I beg your patience as I present the story as best I can, through the haze of time and the cloud of illness. The medications, worthless in their task, have only the effect of slowing my thoughts.
The tale I tell is necessarily shortened, but I am sure it contains everything you need to know.
Now, to the point.
On April 2, 1938, an alien craft was discovered during an exercise in Lake Toplitz. A month later, I personally decoded a message found inside the craft which led to the discovery of four spherical objects, each of which contained a further message.
In the eyes of the leadership, the craft was a gift. The craft landing within the newly extended boundaries of the Fatherland was taken as a sign that we had been chosen; for this reason the find was considered to be one of unparalleled racial importance.
The leadership was extremely protective of the find. The various teams assigned to analyse parts of the craft were kept apart and conv
inced that they were studying the wreckage of fallen Soviet spy planes.
While a decisive intercontinental weapon capable of securing the Reich’s future did not come to pass, much of the rapid progress in rocketry usually credited to my former colleagues did in fact originate from the Toplitz craft.
As for the craft itself: despite intense study over several years, its precise material composition remained a mystery. The material was spoken of as an ultralight alloy, but this does not tell the whole story. I held a piece in my hands, and the term “ultralight” is quite simply insufficient. The piece I held, without exaggeration, was the size of a book and the weight of a single page.
The craft’s material was like nothing recognised by earthly science.
In a word, it was alien.
The four spheres and the plaques they contained were described to me as consisting of “impossibly pure” magnesium. The knee-high spheres were lighter than they looked but not remarkably so; nothing like the craft. All four spheres exhibited an intense multipolar magnetism like nothing any of us had previously encountered.
We all assumed that the spheres were dropped by the craft. My further belief is that the Toplitz craft had in turn been delivered to our vicinity by a still larger vessel, but that is speculation. To picture the Toplitz craft, consider a modern helicopter three times larger than normal. This was no behemoth. The shape was something akin to a bell which had been greatly compressed from top to bottom. It was not a saucer or a disc, nor like any other popular “UFO” projections of modern times.
Now, the spheres.
For reasons still unclear to me, the four spheres were scattered across a great distance. The leadership, again, considered this scattering part of the gift. They reasoned that no one else would have been able to locate and track down all four spheres, even had they somehow discovered the craft. This was no message in a bottle, they said: the spheres were supposed to be found, not stumbled upon. The locations I decoded supported this theory, since no spheres were dropped in the new world or in hostile communist lands.
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