After a few nervous minutes, Emma saw Maria Janzyck approaching on foot, alone. Emma reached across the front seat and unlocked the passenger door. Now that she knew Maria was here and safe, Emma’s unusually worried thoughts turned to the bigger question: Why?
“Sorry to call you out here so late,” Maria said before she even sat down. “But you’re going to want to see this.”
Emma grasped Maria’s tablet computer in her hands. “What am I looking at?”
Maria pressed play. “Just watch.”
“Is that what I think…” Emma began, stopping when the video zoomed in of its own accord to answer her question. Speechless, she watched the eighteen-second clip three more times.
“So?” Maria said.
Emma finally looked away from the screen. “Where did you get this and who else knows?” she asked, straight back to business.
“My researcher,” Maria said. “And my researcher.”
“No one else? No one at the network?”
Maria shook her head.
Emma watched the clip one more time. “How much do you want?”
“Nothing. I just want to see his face.”
“So why didn’t you just take this to ACN?” Emma asked, scanning Maria’s expression for clues.
“They would have just run it with no fanfare or buildup. You’re more… creative. You know how to hurt people.”
Emma took Maria’s last remark in the spirit it was intended, despite how it came out. She was more than glad that Maria had brought this to her first, but still didn’t see her angle. “What do you have against him? Personally, I mean.”
“Walker?” Maria said, scoffing at the mere thought of him. “Did you not hear him this morning when he called me “ACN’s resident Chinese agent”?”
Emma shook her head slightly; she had been focusing so much on the gist of Walker’s defiant outburst that some details had slipped by.
“That’s not the first time, either,” Maria said. “When ACN did a retrospective of his quarter century at the IDA, he point-blank refused to talk to me. We were sitting in his office — just me and Mike, my cameraman. Walker came in with Ben Gold and sat down. I introduced myself, and I swear… I’ve never seen him move so quickly. He stood up like the chair was on fire and then just looked at me. He kept looking at me when he spoke to Gold, in that raspy voice he does when he’s angry. I’ll never forget what he said: “Tell them to send another interviewer, Benjamin. An American.” Then he left. Ben couldn’t say sorry enough times, telling us that Walker was having a bad day or whatever. So that was it. The network pulled the piece, obviously, but they didn’t want to make a big thing of it; they didn’t want to get on his bad side. No one ever does. Seriously, I’ve been doing this for a long time and you’re the first person I’ve met who’s not been scared to make an enemy of Richard Walker.”
Emma didn’t say anything for a while. She couldn’t imagine being judged or treated like that based on her ethnicity, so she didn’t want to pretend that she understood.
“He’s doing his weekly press thing tomorrow,” Maria said. “Maybe you could—”
“Two steps ahead of you,” Emma grinned. She watched the clip one final time.
Maria took the tablet back. “Do you want me to email this to you or put it on a card and give you it tomorrow?”
“Card,” Emma said. Favouring physical over online security was perhaps the only thing she had in common with Richard Walker.
Emma drove Maria back to the end of the dirt path. She asked if Maria wanted to go with her to get Clark’s muffins, which were necessary to justify her trip, but Maria politely declined.
“Thanks for coming to me with this,” Emma said as Maria stepped out.
Maria nodded. “I just want to see his face,” she repeated.
“I don’t know whose face I want to see more when we play this,” Emma said, her eyes glinting as she imagined the moment. “Walker’s or Dan’s.”
FRIDAY
D minus 31
Municipal Hall
Miramar, Argentina
From the crowded steps of a municipal building in Miramar, just a few miles inland, a uniformed public official made a short early morning proclamation regarding the previous day’s hectic search for the Kerguelen sphere.
The statement was not the one that the hundreds of Argentinian journalists outside the building and the millions of people watching on TV around the world had been hoping for. Instead, the official announced a tightening of maritime restrictions in the area around Miramar.
Only licensed fishing vessels would now be allowed within this restricted area, he said, and even then only during unusually limited hours. Though the term “exclusion zone” was never uttered, the official stressed that the restrictions applied to all vehicles and all persons, ruling out private searching by motorboat or even diving. A no-fly zone was also announced for all but government aircraft, which the official promised would have little to no commercial impact given how small the restricted area was.
Reporters filed away from the building to make their way back to the coast where they would rejoin the thousands of everyday citizens optimistically looking out to the sea.
Enterprising salesmen did a roaring trade in plastic binoculars and cheap alien-themed balloons. Coastal cafés and hotels did their best business in years.
Throughout Argentina and beyond, the air buzzed with excitement.
D minus 30
McCarthy Residence
Birchwood, Colorado
As underwhelmed by the anticlimactic Argentinian announcement as anyone else, Clark rose from the armchair to get the last of his four muffins from the kitchen.
Emma took delight in seeing that Now Movement demonstrations had spread from the IDA building in Colorado Springs to government buildings around the country and US embassies around the world, including those in strongly allied nations like Canada and the UK.
ACN and Blitz News played footage of rowdier protests in parts of southern Europe, where protestors had clashed with police throughout the night and where it didn’t take much to stir up latent anti-American sentiment.
The images of these violent overnight clashes were completely at odds with the scenes coming in from cities all over the United States.
Much later in the afternoon, a three-minute ACN piece on the diversity of Now Movement demonstrators reflected just how far the pendulum had swung towards acceptance of a truth that many would have derided only a week earlier. Although countless surveys and studies often cited by Billy Kendrick consistently showed that most Americans believed in the existence of intelligent extraterrestrial life, many had previously been hesitant to say so in public for fear of ridicule. But with the weight of evidence recently brought to light, many quiet believers had quickly become vocal campaigners.
Billy himself had appeared on multiple networks throughout the morning, giving his first extensive comments since the letter was revealed. He described the letter as “the smoking gun to end all smoking guns” and talked in excited tones about the potential imminence of the sphere’s discovery.
Although passions were running high around the world, ACN’s Now Movement feature relayed scenes of good-natured protestors and family-friendly atmospheres. If the pictures from Italy and Greece resembled smaller-scale throwbacks to the fiery anti-G8 protests of the late 20th century, the US demonstrations brought to mind the anti-war marches of the early 21st.
An ACN reporter in Portland interviewed a group of students who had created a banner some forty feet in length, brandishing the full “Truth, Truth, Now Now Now!” slogan in bright neon paint that bordered on garish. Another group in Carson City had bulk-ordered hundreds of Now Now Now T-shirts and sold them on the street at cost price, selling out within minutes. Such stories were not uncommon, and it looked as though most of those unable to source a T-shirt had simply made their own. Some used white tape on plain black T-shirts and some used coloured pens on white; either way, the words Now N
ow Now filled every shot from every camera.
What was clear and heartening to Dan as he watched the ACN feature was that most of the people who had taken to the streets on this weekday morning were evidently not people with long-standing histories of involvement in UFOlogy, SETI, or anything else related to aliens. The saturated media coverage of Dan’s leak, combined with Emma’s masterful viral campaign, had combined to truly amplify the call for immediate capital-D Disclosure.
The feature closed with a mother carrying her sleeping toddler at the edge of a medium-sized march in Baltimore. A local ACN reporter approached her and asked what had brought her out.
“We have a right to know,” the woman said. “We have a right to know what the government knows about aliens. I have a right to know, and my kids have a right to know.”
“Even if it’s bad?” the reporter asked.
The woman’s eyes widened. “Especially if it’s bad.”
“Can’t argue with that,” Clark said.
Dan didn’t say anything. He still didn’t know quite how to feel about the revelation in Kloster’s letter that one of the plaques inside the Kerguelen sphere displayed a timescale for the Messengers’ return. On one hand, he didn’t see why a hostile entity would give warning of its return. On the other, though, he acknowledged the folly of projecting human thought processes onto non-human beings.
“Nope,” Emma agreed. “What do you guys say we go to the drive-in to watch Walker’s press conference?” she then suggested, changing track less subtly than usual. “It’s in forty minutes.”
“Why?” both brothers asked at once.
“Just to show our faces,” she said, feigning indifference. “There’s hardly anyone there, anyway; most of the news teams are at the IDA and most people are at work.”
“I don’t think we should go,” Clark said.
“No?”
“What’s the advantage? If Walker says something we don’t expect, suddenly Dan’s on the spot in front of everyone’s cameras.”
Emma had no answer to this. “I’ve got a surprise,” she reluctantly admitted. “It’s a video we’re going to play on the big screen right before Walker’s press conference starts. And once he sees this, he won’t be saying anything.”
“What is it?” Clark asked.
“Who’s we?” Dan added. “Who else is in on it?”
Emma answered Dan first. “Maria Janzyck showed it to me last night. That’s why I had to go “for coffee”; she texted me to meet her alone. Turns out she hates Walker more than anyone and her researcher found something even he can’t weasel his way out of.”
“So what is it?” Clark repeated, naturally impatient but not quite annoyed.
Emma gave a highly exaggerated shrug. “One way to find out…”
The brothers looked at each other. Dan saw the funny side. Clark rolled his eyes and groaned. “I’ll get the keys,” he said.
Dan turned to Emma. “This better be good,” he said, semi-seriously.
“Dan McCarthy,” she replied in her chirpiest voice, reminding him of the first night. “When have I ever let you down?”
D minus 29
Drive-In
Birchwood, Colorado
The crowd of reporters at the drive-in, while still larger than anything Birchwood had seen before the leak, was nowhere near the level that had descended on the town for Wednesday evening’s letter reveal. With Emma having suggested that Dan wouldn’t be at the drive-in very often and most of the outside news crews now at the IDA to hear Richard Walker’s full response, Dan imagined that this busy-but-not-packed drive-in scene would be the new normal.
Clark drove directly into the lot, prompting an explosion of activity. Phil Norris waved to greet them from his lookout position in the far corner. Jay and Bill, two of the local police officers who had manned the roadblocks on Wednesday, calmly asked the reporters to keep their distance from the car.
Emma took Dan by the arm and headed straight to the ACN van. “Where the hell is Maria?” she asked the man leaning against its bumper. Though smartly dressed and with an expensive-looking haircut, he lacked the “It Factor” of someone who spent their life in front of a camera.
“Kyle Young,” he said, smiling too much. He held out his hand.
“I didn’t ask what your name was,” Emma snapped back. “Where’s Maria?”
“Jeez,” Kyle said, pulling his hand back and reaching into his pocket, “and she said you were nice!” He then held the same hand out again, this time with a small memory card in his palm. “She wanted to cover the thing at the IDA. Here’s the footage.”
Emma took the card. “Maria told me she would be here,” she said once it was safely in her pocket. “That was the plan.”
“Tell me about it,” Kyle groaned. “I’d been at the IDA all day and then she suddenly called me. “Don’t go inside,” she says, “I want to be there.” So then I had to wait for her to arrive, get this card from her, and rush over here.”
“You’re a reporter?” Emma asked. “I thought you were her researcher.”
Kyle laughed. “Is that what she said? I used to be her researcher, but this year I’ve been doing more—”
“So you have seen the footage but you haven’t told anyone else?” Emma interrupted, too focused on the matter at hand to even pretend to be interested in the trajectory of Kyle’s ACN career.
“I didn’t just see it. I found it. And no: I took it straight to Maria.”
“Why? Why not go straight to the network and impress your bosses?”
“It’s her story,” Kyle said, “and she’s always helped me out. I dunno, I guess it’s the same reason she’s decided to give it to you. Well, that and wanting to see Walker’s reaction. Did she tell you about their history?”
“Yeah,” Emma said. She thought back to Maria’s words; after how Walker had treated her, Emma could hardly blame her for wanting to be there in person. A text would have been nice, though.
“Oh,” Kyle said, “and she also told me to tell you that she’s definitely not going to say anything about this until word reaches Walker.”
Emma nodded approvingly. She left Kyle and led Dan by the arm to Trey’s nearby spot. Clark was already in the far corner catching up with Phil Norris.
“Why do I get the feeling you’ve got something up your sleeve?” Trey asked with a smile. As he always did, to his credit, he had kept his distance while Emma was talking to Kyle.
Emma handed him the card and asked him to check that it contained a single short video, as Maria had promised. “But whisper in my ear,” she said. “Dan doesn’t know what it is.”
“Holy shit!” Trey called from the back of his van barely ten seconds later. “Where did you get this?”
“What happened to whispering?” Emma grinned when he returned.
The beaming smile on Trey’s face made Dan irrationally annoyed. “How long until you play it?” he asked Emma, beyond impatient.
She looked at her phone. “Four minutes.”
Dan leaned against the back of Trey’s van, trying not to look into any of the cameras being pointed at his face. Some were broadcasting live footage since a real-life sighting of Dan McCarthy was apparently now newsworthy in and of itself.
He looked up at the drive-in’s giant screen, which Trey had hooked up to play various news networks on a rotating basis. ACN filled the screen at the moment, playing a pre-recorded segment of Maria talking to the camera from outside the IDA building. Her voice resonated around the drive-in lot through the powerful speakers Trey had set up for Dan’s letter reveal two nights earlier.
After a few more minutes, Emma unlocked the metal door at the bottom of the stage’s steps with a key Dan didn’t know she had. She clipped a small microphone to her neckline and walked up the steps. Trey, with very brief written instructions from Emma, went back into his van and pressed something on his computer which brought her face onto the big screen. The sudden change got everyone’s attention.
Dan straightened his back and took a few steps away from Trey’s van. This was it, he realised. Whatever Emma was doing, she was doing it now.
Clark ran across the lot to rejoin Dan, pushing his way through the cameras and reporters who had congregated around Emma’s scaffold stage. “What do you think it’s going to be?” he asked, panting only slightly.
“It can’t be the sphere,” Dan said. “The guy wouldn’t have taken that to Maria.”
“What guy?”
Dan brought a finger to his lips. “Shut up, she’s starting.”
Sure enough, Emma had begun introducing the new and apparently game-changing footage. Dan checked the time. 15:57. She was cutting it fine.
“The Kloster letter was the smoking gun,” Emma said, “and these eighteen seconds of footage are the fingerprints on the trigger.” She held an open palm towards the screen. Like magic, the picture changed to a still image of a hotel lobby. A news reporter in dated clothes stood in the foreground, her mouth open mid-word.
“Is it supposed to be playing?” Clark said to no one in particular after a few seconds, breaking a silence which was remarkably total given the number of people gathered.
“No,” Trey hissed from his van. “Shut up!”
Dan elbowed Clark in the side to add emphasis to Trey’s words. Clark elbowed him back, much harder. Dan pretended it didn’t hurt.
“This footage was recorded inside the Hildorf Hotel in Bonn in 1988,” Emma continued, “six days after Hans Kloster wrote the letter to his brother Wilhelm and three days after Wilhelm died suddenly in an accident. We’ve muted the audio from this news footage since the local reporter is speaking German. The man you can see in the background, next to the second pillar from the left, is Richard Walker.”
Dan and everyone else squinted at the screen. On cue, the still image zoomed in. It wasn’t HD quality and Trey’s computer didn’t magically enhance the image, but the unmistakable shape of Richard Walker’s trademark scar was there for all to see. He looked much younger, quite understandably, but stood with the same ruler-straight posture in the same shade of grey suit as he still did almost thirty years later.
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