Not Alone

by Falconer, Craig A.

  “Nothing stupid,” Clark said. He then proceeded to thoroughly frisk President Slater’s trusted advisor, finding nothing more exciting than two phones and a wallet. He seized them and placed them in his own pockets. “Turn round. And don’t talk.”

  Woefully outsized and outmatched, Jack again obediently followed the order.

  Clark pointed off in the direction of the office. “Walk.”

  Jack began to walk, quite briskly, with Clark watching carefully from a few paces back. They reached the door of the office without incident. Clark held Jack’s arms firmly behind his back, as though he had been doing so the whole time, and kicked the door to knock.

  Emma opened it.

  “I can’t be part of this,” Trey said when he saw Jack Neal being frogmarched through the doorway.

  “No one is in trouble,” Jack said, reassuring Trey with a surprisingly amiable tone. He looked around the office, relieved to see only two more people than the three he already knew of.

  Emma instructed Clark to release Jack. “Who knows you’re here?” she asked. “Slater?”

  Jack shook his head. “Well, she knows I’m in Birchwood to talk to you. My driver is the only person who knows I’m here.”

  “Why the hell are you here? Especially tonight, when the whole world is watching?”

  “That’s the point,” Jack said. “We need to know what you’re going to say. I went to the IDA to talk to Walker, but he wasn’t there.”

  “Who did you see?” Emma asked.

  “Ben Gold. And some idiot security guard,” Jack said, pulling at the rip in his suit. “I think Gold knew where Walker was, but he doesn’t know anything else. Valerie wanted to distance herself from Walker before this event you’re having, but we needed to have some idea what the big secret is before we could commit to saying we’re not in on it.”

  Phil and Trey, unaware of both Emma and Jack’s personal history and also the fact that President Slater had all but conceded that the leak was true, looked completely lost.

  Emma looked at her phone, which told her that the 7pm reveal was only twelve minutes away. “Leaving it a bit late,” she said.

  “I’ve been here for hours but I couldn’t get near you,” Jack explained. “There are more roadblocks than houses in this damn town.”

  “Did you really come alone? No security?”

  “Emma, I swear: Valerie hasn’t told anyone else that I’ve spoken to you about this, let alone that I was flying to Colorado. What would she even tell them? We don’t know what the hell is going on! A few days ago we thought McCarthy was making this whole thing up, just like he thought we were trying to bury it. Now Walker is in hiding and you’ve got whatever new evidence you’ve got.”

  “Slater won’t look too bad, though,” Emma said, trying to shut Jack up. “I’ve already stated publicly that we don’t think she knows anything.”

  “You don’t think it looks bad for a guy like Richard Walker to keep this from her? For a cover-up like this to be going on right under her nose?”

  “I don’t really care,” Emma said. “This is bigger than her.”

  “Emma,” Dan chimed in from the far side of the room, “we don’t have long.” These were the first words he had spoken in a while; the presence of someone as famous and important as Jack Neal intimidated Dan, bringing home just how far in over his head he really was. Without Emma to keep him afloat, he knew he would have drowned in the choppy political waters days ago.

  Emma checked the time again. Dan was right about not having long. “Okay,” she said, still thinking. “Phil… can you stay here with Jack? I need Clark and Trey out there.”

  “Sure thing,” Phil said. He didn’t cut as dominating a figure as Clark, but the old man still looked more than capable of handling a manicured city-mouse like Jack.

  “Does everyone else know what they’re doing?” Emma asked. Trey and Clark nodded. Dan just looked at her. “Everyone out there is on your side,” she tried to reassure him. “You’re not talking to a studio in New York or an asshole Hollywood hypnotist. This is your crowd. This is Birchwood.”

  “But they’re all media people,” Dan said. “Outsiders.”

  “Not even close,” Trey insisted, placing a hand on Dan’s shoulder. “I’ve been out there, man. Sure, the drive-in is full of media, but there are hundreds of regular folks outside the gate, along the street, and even at the top of the hill.”

  “Hawker’s Hill?”

  “Yeah.”

  Dan’s face visibly relaxed. He turned to Emma. “Let’s do this.”

  * * *

  Dan stepped out into a surreal scene. The drive-in, typically deserted and recently quite busy, could only be described as packed. Each microphone and camera competed with every other, hoisted high above the crowd by desperate reporters and journalists.

  The lot was fully lit and Dan made out two portable coffee stands and a food truck, no doubt allowed in by Phil Norris for a share of their takings.

  There were several huge satellite trucks parked on the other side of the gate, including one belonging to Blitz News. They were much larger than any vehicles Dan had previously seen in or around the drive-in.

  And, sure enough, at the top of Hawker’s Hill, Dan saw the reassuring moonlit silhouettes of a crowd of locals.

  After climbing two small flights of stairs with Emma to reach the scaffold stage from which he would address the swarming mass of people below, Dan noticed two laser pointers aiming down at him from the hill. Far from annoying him, these laser pointers settled Dan’s nerves. He remembered sitting at the top of Hawker’s Hill with Clark and some other kids while movies played on the drive-in’s giant screen, and he remembered Clark getting in trouble when he was caught shining his own laser pointer. Dan didn’t mind that this Birchwood tradition had been resurrected; it reminded him that he was home.

  The red and green laser pointers distracted some of the crowd, but Dan didn’t mind as long as the kids didn’t aim for his eyes.

  Clark stood below the stage, guarding the stairs. Mr Byrd and a few of the police officers who had been stationed at the drive-in on rotation since Saturday stood further forward, behind a low metal railing which created a buffer zone between the crowd and the scaffold.

  The screen on the wall right next to Dan’s stage was much bigger than he’d expected. Emma had excelled herself. Dan couldn’t see exactly where Trey had gone or where the projector was, but the screen suddenly burst into life, relaying a live image of Dan and Emma. At Emma’s suggestion, a small watermark in the top right corner of the screen read: “Pictures via Blue Dish Network”.

  All of the reporters except those right in front of Dan looked up at the screen. Like at a large sporting event, the elevated screen offered the best view of what was going on, particularly for those at the back.

  Dan fought a grin as the two laser pointers moved around the screen before settling childishly on Emma’s chest.

  “I’m glad you like the new T-shirts,” she said into her clipped-on microphone, masterfully disarming the hilltop pranksters without veering off message. “These are available online at cost price for anyone who wants to add their voice to The Now Movement.”

  Emma, Dan, Clark, Trey, and Mr Byrd were all wearing the T-shirts. The three-lined and three-coloured Now Now Now logo came across vividly on the big screen. Dan had never before seen Emma in anything as casual as a T-shirt, but he wholly agreed with her point that easily identifiable branding would be beneficial.

  “The Now Movement is about one thing,” Emma continued. She checked her phone as subtly as was possible with hundreds of cameras pointing at her. It was only 18:58; she had to stall. “We’re here tonight, as we have been since Friday, to call for honesty.”

  Dan noticed Emma make a deliberate hand gesture at waist height. Seconds later, the image on the screen changed. The live picture of Dan and Emma still filled the left-side of the screen, but the right-side was divided horizontally into two sections. As Emma had expl
ained to Dan earlier, the original German letter would appear above Dan’s translation. And Trey, wherever he was hiding, was going to highlight important sections of the text while Dan was talking about them.

  The entire thing was scheduled to take no more than ten minutes. Emma estimated that Dan would have taken around thirty minutes to read the whole letter, which was far too long to hold the average person’s attention, even with subject matter as explosive as this. Emma had prepared Dan’s speech with the goal of making it snappy, quotable, and rife with soundbites.

  She thanked everyone for coming out and used other stalling techniques until seconds before the advertised start time of 7pm, loath to begin early given that highly viewed stations that weren’t dedicated to 24-hour news couldn’t cut away early from their programming or commercials. Many such stations had already changed their schedules to accommodate Dan’s reveal, keen to retain viewers who would otherwise have turned to a news network for this must-see TV event. Erring on the side of caution over how long Dan would take to say his piece, Emma had told them all to allow fifteen minutes.

  “Live in ten seconds,” Emma announced on the stroke of 7pm, fully aware that most networks were already broadcasting. She covered her mic and whispered in Dan’s ear: “Game face.”

  * * *

  Dan checked one final time that his notes were in order then introduced himself. In defiance of all logic, he felt a calmness verging on serenity as he looked out at the crowd. The scene before him, of neon lights and bustling bodies, was genuinely surreal; so surreal that it didn’t faze him.

  The most important part of Dan’s speech was the beginning. Emma had made this clear and he understood it perfectly well. They both knew that the letter would take care of itself, but they both knew that Dan had to explain why no one had seen it in the five days since the initial leak. Emma hammered into Dan’s mind that explain was the operative word; he wasn’t going to defend his decision to withhold the Kloster letter, he was going to explain it.

  And explain it he did.

  “I have a letter written by Hans Kloster,” he began. “It was in the Kerguelen folder I found near the IDA building on Friday morning.”

  Flashbulbs went off in Dan’s face, which struck him as somewhat quaint.

  From there Dan told the world what he had already told Clark and Emma, aided this time by the easy flow of Emma’s writing. His initial spur-of-the-moment, booth-of-the-library reason had been a genuine concern that the inclusion of an untranslated and almost unreadable letter would have detracted from the other files in the leak, thus lessening their impact.

  He then explained his decision to withhold the letter even after he had been identified and some of Kloster’s other correspondence had been verified. Dan made clear that he didn’t always know the letter was Kloster’s, and added that he wanted to present his own attempt at a translation before releasing the original so that people could make up their own minds rather than learn about the letter’s content second-hand, “through a biased filter and with a news agenda woven through it.”

  “In light of the way certain news outlets have behaved,” Dan continued, looking deliberately at the Blitz News truck at the gate, “I feel that this decision has been vindicated.”

  Without having to turn round, Dan flicked his eyes sideways to the screen and saw Emma nodding approvingly. The hardest part was over.

  Dan delivered the rest of the speech with only a few stutters, none of which were too bad. He looked up when the notes said “look up” and also managed to raise his eyes while reading some of the more familiar points. Trey controlled the projector without a hitch, scrolling through both versions of the letter at once and highlighting the right sections at the right times.

  The speech didn’t address the letter’s revelations in a strict order, but rather in the order deemed most impactful by Emma. Dan didn’t argue; by this point, he would have given the speech with a traffic cone on his head if she told him it was for the best.

  The only amendment to Emma’s first draft Dan lobbied for was the inclusion of a few lines about the kind of meta-conspiracy he and Billy Kendrick had long believed possible. Their view was supported by Kloster’s mention of Nazi officials encouraging far-fetched rumours of searches for the Holy Grail and the Ark of the Covenant to distract “conspiratorial minds which may otherwise have turned to matters closer to the truth.”

  As Dan said, Kloster was basically making Billy’s “laughter curtain” argument in grander terms. Emma let him have this — and even a shout out to Billy — but she put it near the beginning.

  Each big reveal brought more flashbulbs and commotion: “On April 2, 1938, an alien craft was discovered during an exercise in Lake Toplitz”; “It was not a saucer or a disc, nor like any other modern “UFO” projection”; “What I can say with total confidence is that no one in the American establishment knows what we found”; “The alien craft was annihilated in Lake Toplitz in the spring of 1945”; “The Kerguelen sphere was dumped within Argentine waters, due east of Miramar”; “The second plaque contained a similar representation of Earth, along with what was almost certainly a timescale for the Messengers’ return”; “Treasure hunters have so far been blocked, but you must ensure this remains the case”; “This secret is not of the kind which can safely die with its last keeper”; “In hope of securing a functional ally in the new agency, I have spoken twice with Richard Walker in an effort to persuade him to put himself forward for its leadership”.

  “Richard didn’t show up at the IDA today,” Dan said, going off script to Emma’s mild concern. “He knew this letter was in the folder, and he knew we were going to reveal it tonight. Most of all, he knows he’s guilty.”

  The next words Dan said were from the script. Emma breathed a sigh of relief that he hadn’t ad-libbed anything harmful.

  The Kloster-Walker issue still wasn’t clear cut, since Hans Kloster explicitly told his brother not to tell Richard. Emma and Dan knew that Wilhelm Kloster died in an accident just days before the convention at which Hans planned to give him the letter, but that still didn’t explain how Richard had ended up with it.

  Though they both assumed that Hans, with no one else to turn to, had given Richard the letter before his own surprise recovery from the wasting disease which had prompted him to pass the burden to Wilhelm in the first instance, Emma instructed Dan in the strongest possible terms that there was no room for speculation. “Everyone else can speculate,” she had told him. “We say only what the letter tells us.”

  Dan did exactly that.

  “We are of course willing to make the letter available for forensic analysis,” he continued, reading the part Emma had included to make sure that no one could dismiss the letter as easily as they dismissed the Bigfoot corpses and UFO fragments that people claimed to have found every now and then but uniformly refused to hand over for closer inspection.

  “Providing that certain conditions of transparency and accountability are met, that is,” he added. “Richard Walker is and Hans Kloster was an employee of the federal government with high-level security clearance, so both of their fingerprint profiles should be on record. I’ve read that fingerprints on well-preserved paper last more than long enough for this letter’s origin to be easily verifiable. It goes without saying that I’ve held the letter, so my fingerprints will show up, too. The same goes for the folder itself and every other document within it; I’m happy to make them available for transparent analysis by a reputable lab. But let me make one thing clear: this letter will not end up in a government lab to be cooked and tampered with behind closed doors. Not today and not tomorrow. Not on my watch.”

  Dan realised only as he said these words that they were a direct play on Richard Walker’s famous comment about red flags on the red planet. He flicked his eyes to the big screen and saw that Emma was sporting a rare grin.

  Dan then reached the end of his notes, telling the crowd that both versions of the entire letter — original and translated — w
ould be available online at 7:30, which was now seventeen minutes away.

  Emma talked for the final two minutes of the promised fifteen, impressed by Dan’s ability to maintain the agreed-upon pace. Rather than thank everyone again, she took this time to call for unity in the coming days and weeks. She made the point that anger, though natural, was a pointless response to deceit. “Demand transparency,” she suggested, “not apologies.”

  She then made the more personal point that Dan had done everything he could to get the truth out and now deserved a respite from the invasive media attention that had been building.

  “And as for recovering the Kerguelen sphere,” Emma said, quickening her voice, “it’s not for us to say what happens next, but one thing’s for sure: no one can hide it any longer.”

  “We want to know exactly what’s written on the plaques inside that sphere,” Dan said, butting in, “We want the truth, and we want it now.”

  Emma nodded with the words; his enthusiasm was infectious.

  Caught up in the moment, the flashbulbs, and the attention of the world, Dan then surprised himself by shouting the slogan from Emma’s viral video: “Truth, Truth, Now Now Now!”

  Dan had shouted the words rather than chanted them, but the non-media people at the very back of the crowd chanted them back at him. The green and red laser-pointers, respectfully absent during the presentation, now returned and danced around on Dan’s Now Now Now T-shirt. Dan raised his hand and waived at the crowd.

  Emma signalled for Trey to turn his camera — wherever it was — towards the back of the crowd. Trey successfully did so after a few seconds, and the final image seen by viewers around the world was the sight of several hundred ordinary citizens chanting for the truth.

  “Nailed it,” Emma whispered.

  D minus 36

  White House

  Washington, D.C.

  “Now you pick up?” President Slater boomed furiously into her phone.