“There we are, boy. All gone.”
Ring, ring.
Enraged, Richard limped to the phone as quickly as he could. “Quiet down, Rooster,” he said, before picking the phone up and holding it wordlessly against his ear. He caught a glimpse of the time on the oven: 15:53.
“Sir, I know you said never to call this number, but—”
“For fuck sake, Benjamin!” Richard snapped. “I give you one instruction and you can’t even—”
“Neal is here,” Ben Gold said firmly, raising his voice over Richard’s. “Jack Neal.”
The line was silent.
“I told him I don’t know where you are, but I don’t know if he’s buying it. He says it’s in your best interests to open a dialogue.”
“Open a fucking dialogue,” Richard muttered under his breath. “Does he think this is a hostage negotiation? Listen: find Raúl and tell him to show Neal the exit, face first.”
“Sir, I really think it would be—”
“I think there’s something wrong with my phone,” Richard said.
“Oh?”
“Mmm. It almost sounded like you were questioning my orders.”
Ben said nothing. Richard could hear him breathing.
“So, are we clear?”
“Clear, sir,” Ben confirmed.
“Good. And when you see Raúl, tell him “Mr Walker said don’t be scared to leave a mark.” Okay?”
“Sir, he’s President Slater’s—”
“My phone seems to be going again,” Richard said flatly. “Will I have to ask Raúl to take care of that problem, too?”
“No, sir,” Ben said. “I’ll give him the message.”
“That’s the spirit.”
With the phone down, Richard sat next to Rooster and began to question for the first time whether Ben had been a wise choice of assistant. Richard had initially seen Ben’s near-spineless deference to his authority as a distinct positive, but Jack Neal’s unannounced arrival at the IDA building had revealed it to be something of a double-edged sword.
How would Ben react if forced to choose between loyalty to Richard and deference to another, higher authority?
At this moment, Ben Gold was the only person in the world who had a line of communication with Richard Walker. As such, Richard’s immediate plan of staying out of the spotlight depended entirely on Ben’s trust and cooperation. Jack Neal’s presence in Colorado was not part of this plan, and Richard feared that the next few minutes and hours might prove a bigger test than Ben Gold could handle.
Rooster barked furiously as a small bird settled on the window ledge.
“I sure as shit hope he’s quieter than you, boy,” Richard sighed.
D minus 39
IDA Headquarters
Colorado Springs, Colorado
Richard Walker’s most trusted security guard, known to him only as Raúl, bundled Jack Neal to the IDA building’s back exit.
Jack was no large man and went without protest.
At the door, Raúl pushed Jack firmly in the upper back, sending him to the ground. “And don’t come back.”
Jack held his hands out to break his landing. This worked to an extent, but his hands were raw and his suit scuffed. Fortunately for everyone, there was no one else around to see the incident.
Jack Neal walked round the side of the building, sticking to the wall to avoid being visible from any of the higher windows. He kept his head down and climbed into the back of the waiting car.
“Where to, sir?” the driver asked.
“Two minutes,” Jack said, raising a finger to request the partition.
The driver held down the button to separate the front and back sections of the car.
Jack took his phone from his pocket and called President Slater.
“Well?” she said.
“He’s really not here.”
“What do you mean he’s not there?”
“I mean he’s not here. What else could that mean?”
“Who told you? Ben Gold?”
“Not just Gold. I asked the first security guard at the door if Richard had left yet and he said he hadn’t shown up this morning. I didn’t see his car, either.”
“So where the hell is he?”
“I don’t know,” Jack said, frustration in the words.
Slater picked up on it. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing. Just a little run-in with one of his security guards. Nothing more than a few scrapes and grazes. My suit came out of it worse than I did.”
“Did he know who you were?” Slater asked, doubtful that even Richard would permit physicality against Jack.
“You know, that line really doesn’t work as well as you think. Forget about it. The main thing is Gold.”
“What about him?”
“I’m 99% sure he knows where Walker’s hiding, but I’m 100% sure he doesn’t know anything else.”
“You mean…”
“Exactly. He doesn’t know it’s real.”
“How can you be sure?” Slater pushed.
“You would be too if you’d seen him. He looks like a lost puppy, so far out of his depth you’d almost feel bad for him. He’s protecting a guy who’s been treating him like a fungus for a decade; keeping him in the dark and feeding him you-know-what.”
“But Ford thinks the cover-up “starts and ends at the IDA”,” Slater said. “And if Walker’s number two doesn’t even know…”
Jack sighed. “You’ve known him longer than I have, but if anyone could do something like this alone — if anyone would choose to do something like this alone — well, Walker would be top of my list. And if I learned one thing at XPR, it’s that you don’t bring in more people than you need. When it comes to secrets, there’s safety in solitude. And if Kloster kept this to himself for forty years before passing it to Walker, why would Walker bring anyone else in?”
“But aliens?” Slater said, as much to herself as to Jack. “How could we not know? We have the most advanced… everything. All of our agencies! How?”
“I know,” Jack said, almost but not quite as dumfounded as the President. “But our agencies didn’t exactly have a big presence in 1930s Austria.”
After a lingering silence, Slater cleared her throat. When she spoke, her voice was more like its usual, authoritative self: “Jack, we need to find out what McCarthy is going to say before he says it.”
“I’ve tried calling Emma a thousand times. I think she’s blocked my number.”
“You know what to do."
“Plan B?” Jack asked, hesitant.
“Plan B.”
Jack gulped. “Okay.”
“Keep me informed,” Slater said.
“I will.”
The call ended.
Jack Neal tapped on the glass partition in front of his seat. It lowered.
“Where to, sir?” the driver asked.
Jack forced the word out: “Birchwood.”
D minus 38
En route to the drive-in
Birchwood, Colorado
“Holy shit,” Dan said.
“Fuck me,” Clark added eloquently.
Emma smiled from the back seat. “Told you.”
As soon as Clark stopped the car at the hastily erected roadblock and rolled down the stiff window, a cacophony of engines and voices and even helicopter blades filled the car. It was only 18:25, and the drive-in was still the better part of a mile away.
“Sorry, boys,” the police officer said, rushing to move the block. Clark recognised him. “I didn’t see you coming.” The man and his colleague shifted the temporary fencing — not unlike an elongated hurdle — out of their way.
“Thanks, Jay,” Clark said. “Bill.”
Jay leaned down to window height and winked in at Dan. “Good luck, son.”
“Thanks.” Dan didn’t know Jay, or Bill, or seemingly half of the people Clark did.
Clark kept the window open as he drove towards the drive-in. Every junction had a man
ned roadblock. “This is too weird,” Clark said.
“How are we going to get through the crowd?” Dan asked. He still couldn’t see the crowd, but the noise was growing ever louder as the car continued.
“We’re not,” Emma said.
“We’re not?” Clark and Dan said in unplanned unison.
“I sorted it out with Phil. He’s going to be waiting inside the empty building. I think he said it used to be a restaurant.”
“Fries & Fries,” the brothers said, again in unison.
“Whatever. He said you’d know how to drive round the back, and that he’ll be waiting for us inside. We just have to knock on the back door.”
Clark pulled the handbrake and spun the car around recklessly.
“Woah!” Emma called. Dan was calm, like it happened all the time.
“You couldn’t have told me that before I went the wrong way?” Clark complained.
“But there’s only one road to the drive-in,” Emma said.
Clark accelerated in the direction they had come from then bore left towards another residential street before stopping at its roadblock. “I don’t recognise either of these two,” he said to Dan. “They’re not local.”
“Home address and identification,” the police officer on Clark’s side of the road said in a disinterested tone, still seated in his foldout chair. Clark noticed the man’s badge; he had been brought in from two towns over.
“We’re actually part of the event,” Clark said, downplaying their role ever so slightly. “We were told to take the dirt track by the mound and follow it to the back of the old restaurant. The owner of the lot is waiting for us.”
“Home address and identification,” the man repeated.
“Are you deaf?”
“Clark,” Dan scolded under his breath.
“Home address and identification,” the man said in the same robotic tone.
Clark opened his door.
“Clark,” Dan said again, pulling his arm.
Clark brushed it off without effort. “Listen,” he said to the man. “You can move it, or I can move it.”
Classic Clark, Dan thought. He opened his own door and stepped out.
Emma stayed in her seat, deciding to give it a few seconds to see how things went.
“Karen,” the man said; same dull tone, still in his seat, but this time with a lazy hand gesture to beckon his colleague from the roadblock on the other side of the street. “We have an uncooperative vehicle.”
The second officer, Karen, rushed over. Her eyes shot daggers at the man. “Jesus, Frank, those’re Henry McCarthy’s boys!”
“Oh,” the man said. He rose immediately from his seat.
“You’ll have to forgive him,” Karen said, embarrassed and apologetic all at once. “He’s not from around here, and apparently he doesn’t have a TV.”
Clark laughed. “No harm done.”
Karen and her sorry colleague moved the roadblock. Clark drove on.
“You can’t talk to the police like that,” Dan said. “That whole “you can move it or I can move it” thing. Are you trying to get arrested?”
“As if that guy could have arrested me. He was skinnier than you!”
Dan shook his head; he always struggled to tell how much of Clark’s bravado was an act.
The car continued on a path that Emma thought was taking it further away from the drive-in, but she naturally deferred to the brothers’ local knowledge. When Clark finally took one left towards the apparent end of a side street then another slower and more careful left onto a highly distinct dirt track, Emma heard the volume of the crowd begin to rise again.
“So is your dad, like, a godfather or something?” she asked, aiming the question at Clark and only half joking. “How does everyone we meet know him? And why are they all more impressed that Dan’s his son rather than the most talked about guy in the world?”
“You didn’t tell her anything about Dad?” Clark asked.
“She didn’t ask,” Dan replied.
Clark turned towards Emma for a second. “He’s a firefighter.”
“Was,” Dan said quietly.
“Is.”
Emma didn’t say anything. Henry’s job explained why people in his small town knew who he was and thought well of him, but the level of renown still didn’t stack up. She didn’t know much about the debilitating injury that had left Henry in a coma, and she could only imagine that its nature or source had somehow contributed to the universal esteem he was held in.
The only thing Emma knew for sure was that Dan had sounded slightly hurt when he said “she didn’t ask”, and she now felt more than a little regret at not showing greater interest during all the time she had spent with him.
The dirt path continued. It was clearly marked, as though once heavily used. Emma looked out of the right-side window at desolate fields. She shifted to the left of the back seat and saw fences at the back of the houses along the main street. When the houses and fences stopped, trees took their place. Before long, the drive-in complex came into view up ahead. The walls and the main structure looked much larger from this angle.
Clark parked right outside the central unit’s only door. He knocked three times and waved at the camera above.
“Come in, come in,” Phil Norris said, answering immediately and greeting them warmly. His voice rang through an unseen speaker.
Dan stepped inside. The building showed absolutely no evidence of its former life as a restaurant. It looked like a warehouse with no stock.
“This way,” Phil said. He led them through two doors until they entered a small but well-equipped office, better lit and more fit for human habitation. To Dan’s surprise, Trey was waiting inside.
“Hey, man,” Trey said, rising from a padded chair. “You ready?”
“Pretty much,” Dan said.
“He’s ready,” Emma confirmed. “Projector, screen, camera… where are we?”
“Good to go,” Trey said. “I just need the card.”
Dan handed Trey a memory card containing the scans of the letter and his best attempt at a functional translation. “Am I controlling the slides?” Dan asked.
“Trey is doing it,” Emma said. “I don’t want you to have too much to think about at once. Just read what’s in front of you, look up at the cameras every now and again, and we’ll do the rest.”
“Is the stage definitely safe?” Dan asked. Every little thing was starting to concern him now. His breathing quickened.
Clark put a hand on Dan’s shoulder.
“It’s a solid scaffold,” Trey said. “It could hold ten of you.”
“There’s nothing to worry about,” Emma said.
As if on cue, a warning tone rang through the speakers of the computer on Phil’s desk in the far corner of the room. He looked at the screen. “Are we expecting anyone else?”
Dan and Clark looked at each other then back to Phil, shaking their heads.
Emma walked over to the computer.
“You didn’t tell Byrd to come to the back?” Phil asked.
“No,” Clark said. “No one.”
“Okay. Gimme a sec ’til I figure this thing out.”
“It’s that one,” Emma said, pointing impatiently at a box on the screen. “The one that says Rear Cam.”
Phil Norris clicked the box. His mouth fell open.
An unsure male face looked directly into the camera.
Emma’s hands instinctively shot to the back of her head as she gasped. They then settled in front of her face, cupped around her mouth.
Dan had never seen any serious worry on Emma’s face — it was normally so stoic, even in difficult moments — but for all the world it looked now like she had just seen a ghost.
After four or five seconds, which felt more like forty or fifty, Emma’s eyes left the screen and found Dan’s. She lowered her hands, took a deep breath, and spoke:
“It’s Jack.”
D minus 37
Drive-In
“Jack Neal?” Dan asked. “Jack Neal is here?”
Emma walked to the small office’s exit, grabbing Clark’s arm as she passed him. “No one else,” she said firmly.
The others, confused by everything that was happening, crowded around Phil’s computer to watch the camera feed. Jack looked to be alone; there was no sign of another car.
“What’s the plan here?” Clark asked, hesitantly following Emma through the poorly lit warehouse-like interior of the old restaurant.
“I open the door, you hide behind it. He steps inside, I close the door. He turns round, you restrain him. Got it?”
“But he works for President Slater,” Clark tried to reason. “I don’t think it’s a good idea to—”
Emma stopped, now only a few paces from the door, and looked at him. “Clark, it wasn’t a suggestion.”
Clark looked back at her silently.
“Go,” she said, pointing to the side of the door.
With Clark in place, Emma opened the door.
“Emma,” Jack blurted out. “Thank God.”
“Get in.”
“Thank you,” Jack said, stepping inside. When the door swung closed, he saw Clark, standing further away than he was supposed to be. Jack stared up at him.
Emma nodded to Clark.
“Hands against the wall,” Clark said.
Jack’s eyes dashed back and forth between the two of them. “Emma, come on. I just want to talk.”
Emma turned away and set off towards the office. “Empty his pockets, check for wires, and bring him back to the others,” she ordered.
“Mr McCarthy,” Jack pleaded, ruefully accepting that reasoning with Emma was a lost cause. “I really didn’t come here to cause—”
“There’s two ways we can do this, dude,” Clark said. He didn’t like the situation Emma had put him in, but he knew he had to get himself out of it as quickly and as cleanly as possible.
Jack put his hands on the wall and closed his eyes.
Not Alone Page 29