Be well,
Hans.
D minus 44
McCarthy Residence
Birchwood, Colorado
As Dan expected, Emma finished reading long before Clark. She sorted the printed pages back in order and straightened their edges against the kitchen table. After a few seconds of distant thought, she looked up at Dan.
“Say something,” he said, unable to read her expression.
Emma held her hand out towards the envelope containing the original letter. “Can I see it?”
Dan moved it towards her.
“No!” Clark yelled. He knocked Emma’s arm away with an open palm, more forcefully than intended. “Forensics!”
“What?” Dan asked.
Emma quietly rubbed the side of her forearm.
“She can’t touch it,” Clark said. “I can’t touch it. Think about it: do you really want our fingerprints to show up when they CSI the shit out of this thing?”
Dan pulled the envelope back towards his chest.
“He’s right,” Emma said. She turned to Clark. “But you could have just grabbed my arm without hitting it.”
“I didn’t mean to hurt you,” Clark said, almost but not quite apologising. He flipped through the pages in his hands to see how much more he had to read. Clark then blew air from his lips and put the pages on the table. “I’m still at the part where he’s talking about the U-boats,” he said. “What happens next?”
Dan quickly and excitedly explained: “He talks about blocking dives at Toplitz and Miramar, then mentions Walker.
“I can’t believe you kept this quiet,” Clark said, leaning back in his chair and rubbing his palms together in thought.
“Neither can I,” Emma chimed in.
“It’s not that I didn’t trust you,” Dan said, keen to stress that to her. “Well, I guess it kind of was, but I didn’t even trust myself with this; that’s why I didn’t translate it until tonight. I’ve been driving myself crazy trying not to think about it because I didn’t want to say anything on TV.”
Emma didn’t take it personally. “Why didn’t you leak it with the rest of the stuff, though? That’s what we’re going to have to explain.”
“I wanted to translate it first.”
“Why?”
“So I knew what it said.”
“Dan, I know what translate means. Why didn’t you leak it then translate it?”
“In case it was nothing to do with the leak. I didn’t want to cloud the real issue with something else. I obviously didn’t know that Kloster wrote it. I didn’t work that out until I saw his signature on TV and recognised it. I’ll show you the writing; it’s not as if you can make out the words without trying. I didn’t know it said anything about Kerguelen or Toplitz until I went through it properly. I had to get a book about calligraphy and buy an offline translator and everything.”
“When?” Emma asked. “Where?”
“I asked Trey to buy them on Saturday morning. He gave me them that night. I went to the drive-in, but no one else saw me.”
Emma let go of her right arm, which no longer hurt, and pressed her ten fingers together as though they were arched around a ball. “Trey as in news Trey?”
Dan nodded.
“What does he know? What did you tell him?”
“Well, I didn’t tell him anything, but he guessed that the piece of card I leaked that had the stuff about the spheres on it was a translated extract of something longer. That was on Saturday. Last time I saw him I said I hadn’t started translating it. He swore from the start that he wouldn’t tell anyone, and he didn’t. Just like when I told Clark on Sunday morning: he made me promise that I wouldn’t tell anyone else, and I didn’t. Not telling you wasn’t anything personal,” Dan said, still desperate to make sure Emma understood this. “You know that, right?”
“I’m kind of glad you didn’t tell me,” Emma said, her tone relieving Dan as much as the words did. “I would have been legally bound to tell the firm, and who knows what they would have asked me to do. Seriously, you don’t even want to know what kind of ideas I had to veto. It’s definitely better that you didn’t leak it, even if that will be hard to justify, because there’s so much stuff in here… and some of it is so out there… there’s no way anyone would have given this a chance on Friday. But now everyone knows that Walker lied about it all being fake and that Kloster really did talk to NASA and Argentina. It’s like a one-two punch; first you had the jab, and this is the haymaker.”
Clark shuffled into a more upright position in his chair. He looked at Emma with a softer expression than before. “So what happens now? Do you still have any influence in the media? I know you got fired, but is there any way you can still help Dan get this out and explain why it took so long?”
“It’s not like I have anything better to do,” Emma said, half joking and half serious. “And besides, I have plenty of good ideas that they vetoed.”
“So what does happen now?” Dan asked, glad that Emma and Clark’s mutual dislike seemed to have eased and even more so that she was sticking around, but very much focused on their next move. “Do I just walk to the drive-in at 5:30 and tell everyone?”
“No. We’ll tell them we have something, but not what it is. Make Walker squirm. Make him nervous. People make mistakes when they’re nervous.”
“What about President Slater?” Clark asked. “I got past the part of the letter where Kloster says no one in the government knows, but that was nearly thirty years ago. Slater must know, right?”
Emma and Dan looked at each other for a second. Dan raised his eyebrows to invite Emma to fill Clark in on her phone call with the President’s right-hand man, Jack Neal.
She told Clark everything.
“How old are you?” Clark asked, surprised by Emma’s claim that Jack had hired her almost a decade ago.
“32.”
“I thought you were 31?” Dan said.
“I was, until yesterday.”
“Oh. Happy birthday, I guess.”
“Thanks.”
Clark rose to his feet, palms upturned. “Are we finished counting candles? Because I want to talk about this sphere. If we know where it is, why don’t we look for it? Because if you tell everyone, then the government is bound to find it first. And if there’s a cover-up…”
“We’re way past that,” Emma said. “This letter is a primary document. It’s the smoking gun. And if DNA or fingerprints or something else can decisively link it to Walker and Kloster, it moves from evidence to proof. The only way for Slater to save face now is to come out and say she wants to get to the bottom of this. Even if they did find the sphere, there’s no way they could keep it quiet. Not with all the experts who would be involved in the search and then the analysis. That’s not a secret they can keep; not when Timo is offering a hundred million dollars to whoever breaks it first.”
“Dan?” Clark said hopefully.
“We’re obviously not looking for it,” Dan said. “That would be crazy if we were in a movie, never mind in real life. I still think the best move is for me to go to the drive-in at 5:30 and flat out tell everyone the whole story.”
Three people, three ideas.
Emma shook her head. “We have to make an announcement that we’re going to make an announcement. That’s how you maximise coverage, especially when people are already interested. If we say we have something bigger than everything else so far, it’s going to be a frenzy. It’s called concentrated concentration: we want everyone to be concentrating on the same thing at the same time. It turns an announcement into a happening.”
“Maybe she’s right,” Clark said, looking at Dan.
“So we announce the announcement at 5:30?” Dan said, more or less expressing his agreement with a question.
“I announce it,” Emma said. “I have to explain who I am, why I’m with you, and why the whole Marco thing went down the way it did. It’s better if you stay here. It’s better if no one sees you again until you’re
showing them that letter.”
“Which is when?”
“Tomorrow night. Well, tonight. What time is it anyway?”
Dan checked his phone. “4:48.”
Emma’s eyes widened. “Heat up one of those meals and get me one of those lemonades,” she said to Dan, leaving the kitchen to get her suitcase as she gave the unusually curt orders. “And you… Clark… turn the shower on, as hot as it goes.”
It wasn’t a tone which invited further questions, so the two brothers did as they were asked.
A few minutes later, Dan heard Emma call his name. Her head and one bare arm were visible at the side of the bathroom door.
“Yeah?” he said.
Emma called him closer with her hand. “Put the letter in the folder and take it back to your neighbour’s house,” she said, as quietly as she could over the sound of running water. “Leave it somewhere safe.”
“Why?”
“Just do it, okay?”
“But—”
The door closed in Dan’s face.
“What did she want?” Clark asked from the couch.
“She was just, uh, asking how to turn the temperature down,” Dan said. He carried the letter into his room and crouched down to pick up the folder.
WEDNESDAY
D minus 43
Drive-in
Birchwood, Colorado
With time against her after a frustratingly necessary makeup application, Emma asked Clark to drive her most of the way to the drive-in. He agreed, two strong coffees and one incredible letter having revitalised his mind even as his body remained weary from a full day of sleepless travel.
Dan took the folder across the street to Mr Byrd’s as soon as they left. Mr Byrd’s car was gone and his door locked, so Dan returned home for his emergency key then entered the house. He placed the folder inside the pillowcase in the guest bedroom he had slept in only 24 hours earlier.
Clark’s plan to drop Emma off near the drive-in changed when he saw the extent of the media circus. He had seen a few vehicles when passing in the cab a few hours earlier, but the early morning light revealed around a dozen news vans and several times as many people.
“You’re going too close,” Emma said.
Clark kept driving. Faces came into view, with some of the reporters spotting Emma in the front seat and hurrying to get in position.
“What the hell are you doing?”
Clark drove into the middle of the lot, honking the horn when cameramen got too close. When he parked, the car was quickly mobbed. “Stay there,” he said. He stepped out and walked round to the passenger door. “Give her space or you’re gone,” he boomed.
“Clark!” someone yelled. It was Mr Byrd.
“What’s up,” Clark said.
Mr Byrd walked over, pushed through the crowd and shook Clark’s hand. “She stuck around?” he whispered in Clark’s ear.
Emma saw Mr Byrd, too, and tried to open her door. Clark pushed his weight against it and leaned in to whisper. “You saw her at the hypnotism, right? What do you think… can we definitely trust her?”
“No doubt.”
Clark stepped away from the door. His views on Emma had already shifted greatly, but Mr Byrd’s approval sealed it.
Emma stepped out, blanked Clark, and walked quickly towards the wall.
Everyone followed her, leaving Clark and Mr Byrd alone by the car. Clark looked around the lot, which had been empty for a full decade until just a week earlier.
“Crazy, right?” Mr Byrd said, reading Clark’s eyes.
Clark chuckled. “Wait until tonight. What are you doing down here so early, anyway?”
“Oh, you know, making sure everyone behaves. Phil is asleep in his car somewhere.” Mr Byrd scanned the parked vehicles. “Over there. He still owns the lot, so we’ve been taking shifts on lookout. There’s usually one or two of the boys here, too. Making sure none of the news crews disturb the town’s residents, you know?”
Clark saw two uniformed police officers respond to Mr Byrd’s hand gesture by walking over. Mr Byrd introduced Clark as “Big Henry’s oldest” as he shook hands with the two men, who solemnly passed on their best wishes before returning to the semi-circular crowd which was forming around Emma.
“You should wake Phil,” Clark said, surveying the lot again and wondering how it would cope with the inevitable stampede of outsiders who would swarm to the night’s announcement like worms to rain. “We need to talk to him about tonight.”
“What’s happening tonight?”
Clark nodded towards Emma, who had just begun addressing the assembled reporters.
Mr Byrd listened to her introductory remarks as he walked over to Phil’s car, a well-rusted blue sedan that couldn’t have been much younger than the Kloster letter.
Emma saw red lights and green lights on the cameras before her, knowing that she was going out live to millions of homes across the country.
Succinctly, professionally, and with no notes to fall back on, Emma delivered a full and candid rundown of the entirety of her history with Dan. He watched from home, assuming by now that Clark had opted to stay.
Emma began with XPR’s initial order for her to fly to Colorado from Las Vegas at thirty minute’s notice, and continued on to Dan calling her to help with the invasive news vans when he had nowhere else to turn. She then publicly thanked ACN and Blue Dish Network for agreeing to retreat to the lot she was speaking from and simultaneously slammed Blitz News for reneging on the deal by returning to take photos of the inside of Dan’s car only hours later.
She spoke as though the speech was well rehearsed, commending Dan for how well he had done during his media appearances but revealing for the first time that she’d had to talk him into everything. She briefly touched on his refusal to film three short ad spots for “a high five-figure sum” and spoke of his outright refusal to deal with any outlet owned by Blitz Media as a result of their actions. Emma then called their publication of Dan’s schoolwork “out of order but not out of character” and promised to show the world how low they had stooped in a matter of moments.
Before doing so, she took a swipe at Richard Walker for using Dan’s medical history — inaccurate or not — as a weapon. There was passion in her voice as she called Richard’s words “as irresponsible as they were unfounded”, echoing Dan’s criticism that using a mental health condition to dismiss his voice as unworthy added stigma to conditions whose sufferers were already prejudicially pigeonholed by many.
“But back to Blitz,” Emma said, a smile creeping across her face as she reached into her pocket. She held up a small memory card for the cameras. “I hold in my hand concrete and incontrovertible evidence of illegality conducted by Blitz Media against Dan McCarthy. The footage on this card shows a Blitz employee bugging Dan’s house on Monday evening, while we were on the way home from Cheyenne. The individual in question was identified by my former employers at XPR, who vetoed the release of the footage for what can only be described as political reasons. I want to stress the key point here: Dan McCarthy, an innocent, honest, and upstanding citizen, feels unsafe in his own home because of Blitz Media’s unprovoked personal vendetta.”
Emma saw only approving nods from the reporters in front of her; everyone who worked in the non-Blitz media hated the corporation for its predatory practices, which included everything from passing off other networks’ footage as their own to insisting on exclusive deals with their advertising partners.
Someone in the crowd yelled an out-of-turn question about when and where the footage would first air.
“Everyone who’s here can air it at 6am,” she said. “I’ll pass it round. That’s the fairest way. If any of you air it a second before I give the green light, you’re gone. And trust me, you’re going to want to be here at 7pm tonight. This is nothing compared to what’s coming.”
Emma knew that announcing one major piece of news at a time was a basic rule of PR, but the Blitz thing was more personal than productive. Th
ey deserved it.
Predictably, several of the reporters, keen to have their voices heard during a segment that was guaranteed to bring ratings, yelled out their similarly worded questions about what was coming.
“Decisive evidence,” Emma said. “I’m not exaggerating: this changes everything. Seriously, we’re willing to stake our credibility on the fact that you will not be disappointed. Dan McCarthy will be here tonight to tell you everything you need to know and more, live and in person.”
Reporters again shouted over each other. Having expected something more like stunned silence, Emma didn’t appreciate it. Fortunately, the word “Slater” rose above the others and gave her a way to end her statement with a bang.
“President Slater doesn’t know what we have,” she said, quickly silencing the crowd. “President Slater doesn’t know, period. This cover-up starts and ends at the IDA. I’ve already said more than I should have, so we’ll end it there. Every news outlet that’s here: you’ll get the Blitz footage in a few minutes. Every news outlet that’s not: you’re going to want to make it here by 7pm.”
Reporters crowded Emma as she walked towards Clark, Mr Byrd, and Phil Norris. “Give her space,” Clark shouted. The reporters parted. Clark didn’t ask Emma why neither she nor Dan had told him anything about the bugging; they’d all been preoccupied with other, more pressing matters.
Emma was glad to see Phil, who she knew owned the lot. “You’re okay with an influx tonight, right?” she asked, as though it wasn’t too late. “The more attention this place gets now, the easier it’ll be for you to monetise it later.”
“Oh, I’m counting on that,” Phil laughed.
“Good.” Emma took a half-step back. The U-shaped drive-in lot was surrounded by two high parallel walls connected by a disused retail complex. The complex, whose facade the screen had once been mounted on, used to be occupied by a handful of stores and restaurants. Emma squinted at the space above the shuttered windows. “How would you feel about putting a big screen up there again?” she asked.
Not Alone Page 27