He ignored the handful of personal comments from the crowd, most of whom were loudly chanting Emma’s immediately successful slogan: “Truth, Truth, Now Now Now!”
Emma didn’t arrive at this slogan, the T-shirt design, or The Now Movement’s name by chance. She had weighed up the options on her shortlist and wisely decided that a “Now Movement” was preferable to a “Truth Movement” or a “Disclosure Movement” for two key reasons. First, both of the alternatives carried certain connotations; the former was too close to 9/11 terminology, and the latter conjured up images of hardline UFOlogists who dismissed Billy Kendrick as a line-toeing moderate.
But more importantly, a “Now Movement” presupposed both Truth and Disclosure. The Now Movement took the value of Truth and the inevitability of Disclosure as its starting point, and by doing so was able to focus its energy on the urgency of its goal.
There was also a secondary benefit that the word “Now” resonated better with restless youth than did the abstract concepts of Truth and Disclosure. One look at the size and average age of the IDA crowd vindicated Emma’s thought process. As everyone around her recognised, she knew what she was doing.
As Richard reached his building’s revolving doors, he stopped and turned to the crowd. Police officers had waded in by now, creating a proper cordon. Richard pointed to a reporter off to the side and called her in. Her microphone said Blitz News.
From his couch at home, Dan gleefully assumed that Richard didn’t know of Blitz’s shameless flip-flop.
“I want to say something,” Richard said. To his visible chagrin, the crowd didn’t stop chanting. If anything, their intensity increased.
“Truth, Truth, Now Now Now!”
“I want to say something,” Richard repeated more firmly.
“Truth, Truth, Now Now Now! Truth, Truth, Now Now Now!”
Richard shrugged. He held the microphone close to his mouth. The Blitz News cameraman capturing the footage that Dan was watching sidestepped around Richard until his view included much of the unruly crowd as well as a side-on view of Richard, capturing his famous scar in the centre of the frame in a way that had to be deliberate.
“This is insanity,” Richard said, talking directly to the reporter whose microphone he had taken rather than to the camera or the crowd. “What’s changed? What did I miss? Has McCarthy shown the world an alien corpse? A section of a spacecraft? Anything that didn’t originate in his own mentally ill mind?”
“So you’re confident that DNA and fingerprint testing will exonerate you?” the reporter asked, leaning in towards the mic.
“Exonerate me?” Richard barked. He stared at the reporter for several seconds, taken aback by her antagonistic question. “From what? If I write a letter confessing to a murder then smear a sample of Valerie Slater’s DNA all over it, does she go to prison?” He pushed the microphone towards the reporter’s face.
“I, uh…”
“Exactly. Of course she doesn’t. There’s no body, because there was no murder. Just like there’s no sphere.” Richard turned to the crowd. “Now Now Now!” he yelled, mocking them. “Now what? Where’s the sphere? Show me the sphere! Why has it never turned up? Seventy years. Ask yourself that. Seventy years! It doesn’t strike anyone else as a little too convenient that the story happened so long ago, so that everyone involved can be too dead to deny it?”
The reporter took the mic again. “Just because the sphere hasn’t been found yet, that doesn’t mean—”
“No,” Richard said, grabbing it back. “It does. Let me make this clear: when the entire world is looking for something, absence of proof is proof of absence. So you can have your contrived little DNA test to go with every other contrived episode in this sorry affair. It’s been a circus from the start. Credit to the PR girl… I will say that. She’s protected McCarthy like a lamb while convincing you all he’s a lion.”
The Blitz News reporter stayed quiet.
“And sure,” Richard went on, “he’ll play along with jesters like the hypnotist; he’ll join the tamest Focus 20/20 line-up I’ve ever seen, via satellite; he’ll stand next to good ol’ Billy Kendrick in front of a roomful of idiots; he’ll give an exclusive first interview to ACN’s resident Chinese agent; he’ll read whatever speeches Ford puts in front of him, waving to the adoring press like he’s Mandela The Second. And now they’re selling T-shirts!” Richard rubbed his hands together, smiling broadly. “Talk about a brass neck.”
Many people near the front of the crowd had by now stopped chanting to try to hear Richard’s words. The last thing anyone had expected was this kind of fighting talk.
“Now, I’m late for work. Yesterday was my fourth sick day in almost thirty years, so I have some things to catch up on. I won’t be here to play your games this afternoon, but all legitimate media outlets are invited as ever to my weekly press briefing tomorrow. I’ll have a properly prepared response then to these ridiculous accusations, but for now I ask you only to remember what I said last week. McCarthy had been sitting on these “leaked” documents for who-knows-how-long and seized the opportunity to publish them in the aftermath of the robbery. Funnily enough it took him five days to come forward with this “Kloster letter”, which just so happened to fill in the blanks and answer the questions everyone was asking. But why did no one see him picking the folder up from the street? Winchester Street is a busy street, and the police responded to the alarm almost instantly. Think about it. That’s all I ask.” Richard looked out at the crowd before walking through the doors. “Just think about it.”
“Richard Walker,” the Blitz News reporter said, now facing her cameraman. “Defiant as ever.”
D minus 33
McCarthy Residence
Birchwood, Colorado
While Dan and Clark’s expressions betrayed their concerns over Richard Walker’s unexpected confidence that the Kerguelen sphere would never be found, Emma paid more attention to the implicit concessions he had made.
Emma reassured the brothers that Richard’s attempts to pre-empt the inevitably damning results of fingerprint or DNA analysis by questioning the test’s integrity was the act of a desperate man. Richard hid his desperation behind a well-practised facade, but Emma and many others could see right through it.
She re-watched the part of the impromptu speech when he yelled “show me the sphere!”, playing it several times and each time pointing to his throat as he gulped deeply after saying it.
The celebratory mood of the previous night returned slightly over breakfast as Clark and Emma caught up with the assorted developments Dan had already seen. ACN and Blitz each gave Richard’s appearance no more than a few minutes of their hourly cycles throughout the rest of the morning, backing up Emma’s point that his credibility had already been irreversibly tarnished.
The news cycles now included new footage of citizens in Argentina crowding the coast as an uncountable number of boats and ships searched for the Kerguelen sphere due east of Miramar. Before long, news helicopters arrived to reveal the full scale of this spontaneous and unmanaged treasure hunt.
“Looks like Miramar is the new Birchwood,” Emma said.
Her phone then buzzed on the floor beside the TV, where she had left it charging overnight. She picked it up. A sophisticated virtual assistant app redirected Emma’s calls and messages based on dozens of sorting rules and contact groups, meaning that only important calls and messages made it to the stage of an automatic notification.
By now, Dan knew this, too. “Who’s it from?” he asked.
“Tara,” Emma said. “My sister. Really, this time. It just says: “Don’t worry, I’m nowhere near it.” What’s she talking about? Has there been an attack?”
Dan flicked through all of the rarely watched international new stations on his TV, looking for anything that wasn’t coverage of the leak. “I don’t think so, but there was something about a tsunami earlier. Does she live in Thailand?”
“She doesn’t really live anywhere,” Emma said
. “Last time I spoke to her she was in India. Or maybe it was Indonesia. Is that near Thailand?”
“She said she’s nowhere near it, anyway,” Clark said. “Whatever “it” is. Don’t worry about it. She’s fine.”
Something about Clark’s tone — as straightforward as Dan’s, but deeper and more authoritative — made these words more reassuring than they should have been.
Emma replied to her sister’s text with a request for more details, then scanned the overwhelming number of calls and messages received in the last twelve hours, beginning with those starred as potentially important. These were from contacts Emma had spoken to recently but not added to her very short whitelist, which included only family members, important media figures, XPR staff, recent clients, and Jack Neal. Conveniently, all voice messages from non-whitelisted contacts were automatically converted to text for ease of searching and sorting.
Emma quickly saw that almost all of the overnight correspondence came from media outlets and marketing departments keen to have Dan appear on their shows or promote their products. She added two new rules based on the terms “your client” and “mutually beneficial”, which immediately moved 80% of these messages to a folder marked “non urgent”.
Of the now manageable list of messages, three were from outside North America. Emma’s attention immediately fell on the message with a Chinese flag icon next to it. She read the message and turned to Dan.
“A university in China wants to give you an honorary degree in International Cooperation,” she said.
“They want to what?”
“You’re not going to China,” Clark butted in.
“I wasn’t talking to you,” Dan said.
“He’s right, though,” Emma said. “It’s a political invitation. We don’t do politics.”
“Especially not Chinese politics,” Clark said. He looked at Emma and pointed to her phone. “Tell them where to shove it.”
Emma swiped to the next message. “What would you think about going somewhere else?” she asked when she read it, her face giving little away. “Getting out of Birchwood for a while might not be the worst idea. We’ve done all we can do here, and international pressure will make it harder for the government to try anything funny with the sphere.”
“Do you really think they’d try something?” Dan asked. “Jack Neal sounded resigned that it would turn up.”
Dan was right; Jack had been resigned. He was surprisingly calm and almost understanding about being locked in the office with Phil Norris during the letter reveal, as though he knew Emma was just doing what she had to do.
Emma shrugged. “I’m not really talking about Slater and Jack. A government — or an administration, or whatever — isn’t really the sum of its parts like people think, because all of those parts are competing for their own interests and pulling in opposite directions at the same time. It’s like an organism at war with itself. There are a lot of people who want to see the back of Slater and I’m pretty sure this is out of her hands now, anyway. You heard Jack last night: his focus is on getting her through this alive. It’s damage limitation.”
“So where is it this time?” Clark asked, bored by the talk of Slater and keen to find out more about this “somewhere else” Emma spoke of.
“London,” she said.
Clark weighed it up, looking favourable.
“Godfrey has invited us to a private reception,” Emma explained, “like the kind he has for athletes who win medals. That’s if this really is the number for Downing Street’s press office; I’ll have to check it out.”
“And how is that not a political invitation?” Dan asked. “Godfrey just wants to use me for a photo-op to get one over on Slater.”
“Maybe, but he’s the highest-profile figure who’s been on your side from the start.”
“But everyone hates him,” Dan said, the words dripping with derision. “It would taint me. What happened to being careful who I associate with?”
“At least think about it,” Emma said. She clicked into the third of the three international messages. This one had an Italian flag and came from an existing contact. “Or think about this,” she said more excitedly, holding the phone out so they could read the sender’s name.
Clark saw it first. “Timo Fiore?”
“Where does he live?” Dan asked, not instantly dismissing this possibility as he had the last one.
“Somewhere near Milan,” Emma said. “Most of the time, anyway. Do you have a passport?”
Dan nodded.
Timo Fiore, having been born in Naples to an Italian father and a Swiss-born mother of French and German parentage before spending most of his formative years in England, self-identified primarily as a citizen of Europe. Timo tended to keep himself out of the political arena but was known to support the European Union’s broad goals as staunchly as he criticised its bloated and ill-functioning bureaucracy.
And unlike Godfrey’s, Dan knew that Timo’s interest in the leak was anything but political or opportunistic, well aware of the billionaire’s years-long involvement in deep-space observation and of the no-strings funding he had offered Billy Kendrick for touring expenses.
Dan turned to Clark. “Anything against Italy?”
Clark clapped his hands together as if squashing a fly. “When do we leave?” he asked with a smile.
D minus 32
Drive-In
Birchwood, Colorado
Emma returned the call from one of Timo Fiore’s many assistants and ironed out the details of the invitation with Timo himself. It was quickly agreed that Dan would leave for a six-night stay on Monday, now four days away.
Timo, delighted by the news, extended his invitation to Billy Kendrick. Unfortunately Billy was unable to accept; Dan’s return would fall on the final night of Billy’s long-planned ET Weekender, which marked the end of his months-long tour. When Emma contacted Billy on Dan’s behalf to explain why he could no longer attend, Billy was highly supportive and insistent that those who had purchased tickets expecting to see Dan would understand that it was more important for him to spread the word to Europe.
Now, at the end of a long if surprisingly uneventful day, Emma found herself alone at the back entrance to the drive-in lot’s former restaurant. Dan and Clark were none the wiser.
The invitation came at 11pm from an unexpected source.
Prime Minister Godfrey and President Slater were yet to make any public comment in the wake of the Kloster letter’s publication, while Richard Walker stuck to his word of not talking to the media again by leaving the IDA via a secret exit. Emma had expected this to be a day when everyone commented given it was the first time since the initial leak that something tangible had happened. She justified the conspicuous collective silence by reasoning that the high-profile figures involved were being more careful with their words now that the whole thing felt real.
Godfrey had previously made grand pronouncements about aliens safe in his belief that they were hollow political barbs. Slater, meanwhile, had dismissed out of hand what she didn’t believe was possible. But now that Slater’s suppressed fears of a cover-up from below seemed well-founded and Godfrey’s expressed hope of further evidence emerging had come true, both wisely decided to bide their time and measure their words.
Emma’s phone had buzzed while she was on the way to the bathroom during a commercial break on ACN, just out of the brothers’ sight and earshot. The message came from a whitelisted contact who she had been watching only minutes earlier: Maria Janzyck.
“Meet me alone ASAP. Dirt path round back.”
“Where can I get good coffee around here?” Emma asked as she returned to the couch, grasping at a spur-of-the-moment exit strategy.
“Mr Wolf’s bookstore,” Dan said with a hint of pride in his voice.
“Is it open?”
“Nowhere is open at this time,” Clark butted in. “You’re not in New York.”
“There must be somewhere in the city? Surely some of the bi
g chains stay open?”
Clark shrugged. “If you want to drive five miles for coffee, I guess.”
“Does anyone want anything?” Emma answered with a question, hoping they would say no.
Dan shook his head.
“Get me a muffin,” Clark said. “Actually… make that four muffins.”
“Straight to four?” Emma asked, laughing.
Clark grinned. “Five would just be greedy.”
Emma grabbed her coat and Dan’s car keys. “How come you don’t have a car?” she asked Clark as she opened the door.
“I’m hardly ever here,” he said.
The streets were predictably quiet, with far fewer roadblocks — officially described as checkpoints — than the night before. There were still roadblocks at both main entrances to Birchwood so that the police could keep track of which media outlets were arriving. No media vehicles at all were permitted through the main roadblock between the drive-in and the area of Birchwood where Dan lived; since this area was entirely residential and provided no throughway, it was decided that media vehicles had no legitimate reason to pass. These measures were exceptional, of course, but so was the sudden influx of outsiders and the relentless global spotlight.
Emma remembered the turn Clark had taken to the dirt path the night before and slowly followed the same route. She dimmed her lights and pulled up outside the back door of the old restaurant. There was no sign of Maria Janzyck or anyone else. The area was too dark and isolated for Emma to consider stepping outside alone, so she slowly continued forward. At the end of the path, which came very soon, she turned round and returned to the door.
Still no one.
Less impatient than concerned, Emma picked up her phone and called Maria.
“I can see your lights,” Maria said, picking up immediately. “Stay there.” She ended the call as quickly as she had answered it.
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