“Now watch,” Emma said.
The footage zoomed back out slightly, showing Richard’s full body at a decent resolution. A man, older than Richard, appeared from off-camera.
“Hans Kloster.”
Kloster approached Richard and extended his hand. Richard cupped both of his hands around Kloster’s and held them there for a second. He then patted Kloster on the shoulder in consolation.
Then came the key moment.
Kloster leaned in close to Richard and whispered something in his ear. Unfortunately there was no dramatic pan of the camera; no focus on Richard’s shocked face. But still, the way his body stiffened suggested that the whispered words had been shocking.
Richard and Kloster both scanned their peripherals before Kloster produced an envelope from his left trouser pocket and handed it to Richard, who immediately placed it in his own inside breast pocket and headed straight for the hotel’s entrance, walking towards the camera as he went.
“Richard Walker failed to give his scheduled speech that night and reported feeling unwell,” Emma said. “As we all know from the letter, Hans Kloster thought he had very little time left. So when his brother died three days before this conference, he had no one else to turn to. No one else but Richard Walker.”
Emma held her hand out to the screen again. Following her written instructions, Trey skipped the video back and zoomed in tight on the envelope. A dark blue seal was visible on the back, though not in great detail.
“This envelope and marking might look familiar,” Emma said. She kept her hand out, waiting for Trey to follow the next instruction. After a slightly awkward four-second wait, Dan’s high resolution scan of the letter’s envelope appeared side by side with the archival footage. Emma didn’t have to say anything else.
The reporters stood in stunned silence; this was as red-handed as Walker could ever be caught, and no one knew how to react.
“It’s four o’clock,” Clark shouted, continuing his 100% silence-breaking streak.
Emma looked more grateful than annoyed. She signalled for Trey to put one of the news networks back on the big screen.
“We’ve done our part,” Emma said, walking down the steps from the scaffold stage. “Now let’s see what happens when Walker finds out what you’ve all just seen.”
D minus 28
IDA Headquarters
Birchwood, Colorado
With space inside the IDA’s press room strictly limited, priority was given to the local media outlets and freelance reporters who had covered Richard Walker’s weekly press conferences since long before the influx of outsiders. The number of such regulars was small, however, so many large national and international news agencies found themselves in the unspectacular room, excitedly awaiting Richard’s arrival.
The mood outside the IDA building was tense. A much larger police presence now surrounded the perimeter, and some of the protestors near the cordon seemed more combative than their counterparts in other American cities. There were no young children or families to be seen as ACN’s newscopter relayed its last few seconds of outdoor footage; the crowd consisted largely of young men and young women with stern expressions and aggressive tones.
ACN’s pictures cut inside as Richard Walker took his position at the speaking podium. Ben Gold, though not by his side, was only a few steps out of shot.
“Before I begin,” Richard said, quietening the jostling crowd. He took a few seconds to reposition the countless network-branded microphones on his podium. After moving most back by a few inches, he lifted the Blitz News mic and held it up for the cameras.
“I’d like to take this opportunity to dissociate myself and my staff in the strongest possible terms from the underhand and indefensible tactics employed by Blitz Media in their targeting of Dan McCarthy. Yes, he is a compulsive liar, but that does not justify illegal surveillance. I won’t embarrass the reporter from Blitz News or the correspondent from The Daily Chat by asking them to leave,” he continued, pausing until everyone else in the room turned to fire scornful looks at the Blitz employees, “but they won’t be getting in again. Until I have sufficient proof that the editor of The Daily Chat and content editors at Blitz News no longer engage in these kind of activities — which they have been involved in for far longer than most of you know — no Blitz employees will be welcome in my building.”
A few flashbulbs went off from the right-hand side of the crowd. Richard, keen to get through his speech, didn’t stop to rebuke the photographers as he usually would have.
“That said, almost every other media outlet represented here today is equally guilty of something else, and that is talking about my relationship with Hans Kloster as though it’s supposed to be some kind of secret; as though I wish for my admiration of Hans’s work and character to be unknown. Nothing could be further from the truth. Hans Kloster was a giant among giants, and I will not sit back and watch his name be dragged through the mud by snot-nosed millennials like Dan McCarthy and his self-serving XPR puppet-master.”
Changing pace, Richard reached under his podium and lifted out a framed picture, roughly 12x18. More flashbulbs went off, capturing a shot of Richard’s much younger self shaking hands with Hans during their first meeting in Dallas. The picture had been taken in 1976, twelve years before the Bonn conference and only a few months after Richard joined the Office of Science and Technology Policy.
Back in Birchwood at the drive-in, Emma could hardly believe her luck. This is too good, she thought to herself as everyone watched the big screen. He’s setting himself up perfectly.
Richard, meanwhile, could barely recognise himself through the haze of time as he looked at the picture in his hands. The joy of meeting a hero like Kloster gave his face a truly boyish quality, but his infamous lip-scar had been even more prominent in those pre-surgery days.
“Hans endured times far more turbulent than these,” Richard said, “and the stain of party membership, compulsory or not, never left him. But Hans was never one to make a fuss of himself. He did his work and he did it well, and that was enough. The retirement speech he gave in Dallas resonates with me to this day, so allow me to share the closing lines.”
Richard cleared his throat and quoted Kloster directly:
“Forget what the onlookers think, for a man’s thoughts die with him. Remember instead that the children of tomorrow will view today with the clarity of hindsight. All lies will be revealed and all truths will emerge. So jettison your preoccupations with the respect of your peers in favour of a promise to do right by generations unborn. The present has passed before we can touch it, but the future is ours to shape. Serve posterity, not power, and hold legacy before ego.”
Richard caught two reporters near the front whispering to each other. “Have some respect,” he boomed.
The whisperers took no notice, instead turning to those behind them and passing on whatever the big news was.
Maria Janzyck stood quietly in the middle of the pack, relieved to have secured a position inside thanks to both Kyle’s agreeableness and ACN’s habit of sending a junior reporter to cover Richard’s weekly briefings. The message hadn’t reached her yet, but she knew what it was. Fighting a losing battle, she tried to keep herself from grinning.
After a long twenty or thirty seconds, a reporter just in front of Maria shouted something about the letter and the drive-in.
Richard, lost as to what was happening, turned to Ben Gold. Ben very quickly looked at his phone then spoke to Richard loudly but without shouting: “They just played something on the big screen.”
“Who played what?” Richard asked.
Ben asked for a moment to check the details.
For the next minute or so, the scene was more pantomime than press conference. Several reporters were quicker than Ben to find the full story. One, representing a local station based in Boulder, took it upon himself to tell Richard what had happened.
“It’s archive footage from a German news station,” the man said in a smoo
th, radio-quality tone. “Shot in the lobby of the Hildorf Hotel during the Bonn conference in 1988. It shows Kloster handing you the letter.”
“What letter?” Richard asked, almost indifferently.
“McCarthy’s letter.”
Richard chortled. “At least you’re calling it by its real name.”
“I mean the letter McCarthy leaked,” the man said, his tone still smooth but the words now a little shaky under the pressure of a conversation with Richard Walker. “They showed footage of Kloster handing it to you. It has the same stamp on the same envelope and everything.”
“How is no one else bored of this?” Richard asked. “How is no one else bored of this piecemeal release of so-called evidence, one breadcrumb at a time? I’ve said a thousand times that the PR girl knows what she’s doing, but none of you seem to be catching on. They obviously found this footage of Hans handing me an innocuous letter — an invitation to his brother’s funeral, if you must know — and created a similar-looking envelope for their fake letter. Again, I’ve never said McCarthy is an idiot. He’s a liar, not an idiot.”
At first, no one knew what to say. Richard was uncannily convincing in what he said, but everyone had heard and seen the letter being exhaustively broken down by historians and other experts. It just didn’t seem possible that Dan or anyone could have concocted such an elaborate hoax; one which had already provoked responses from governments around the world.
“Timo Fiore is bribing our government officials with obscene amounts of money yet nothing has come out,” Richard went on. “What does that tell you? It tells you that there’s nothing to come out! At the risk of sounding like a broken record: when the entire world is looking for something, absence of proof is proof of absence. But I have to stress that what McCarthy is doing isn’t even whistleblowing or selling secrets; this is making up lies and selling them as the truth. I’ve been saying this for a week. He didn’t make a one-off poor decision to leak something he saw in the course of his duties, as we’ve seen with other whistleblowers. He and his associates have conducted a calculated campaign of disinformation designed to destabilise our country.”
The Boulder-based reporter, still the focus of Richard’s gaze, felt compelled to respond. “You don’t really expect anyone to still believe this is some kind of stunt, do you?”
“Not just any kind of stunt,” Richard said, addressing the whole room again. “I don’t think anyone, even someone as psychologically challenged as McCarthy, would go to these quite extraordinary lengths just to prove themselves right. There are easier and less dangerous ways to get rich, too. What is becoming clearer by the day is that there are unseen forces at work here. Again, re-read my words from last week: this leak, not to mention the circus surrounding it, represents a very real threat to our national security. A very real threat.”
Maria Janzyck had heard enough. She knew Emma and Dan better than any of the other reporters in the room, and she knew Richard Walker better than most of them, too. She knew who was lying and she wasn’t prepared to let him away it with for another second.
“Mr Walker,” she said firmly, projecting her voice more than necessary.
He laughed heartily. “Look who it is.”
“Hans Kloster wrote the letter for his brother Wilhelm, who died just after it was written and just before the conference in Bonn. Hans had nowhere else to turn, so he turned to you. As is well documented, he then used his scientific and political influence to ensure that you were appointed head of the IDA just months after this conference. The truth won’t go away just because you deny it.”
“Was there a question in that, or are you just here to say your piece?”
“The question was—”
“I was being rhetorical,” Richard interrupted. He looked around the room. “I should explain to the rest of you that Maria here has been, how can I put this, rather snug with Team McCarthy since the beginning. And really, who better to illustrate Chinese infiltration.”
“I’m from Denver,” Maria snapped back.
Richard half-grinned. “And tell me, was Janzyck your surname at birth?”
“None of this has anything to do—”
“It was a simple question,” Richard said, still smiling to himself and now back in his groove. “I know it was Chan, but I don’t think many of your colleagues do.”
“Chan is my maiden name,” Maria said, flustered to the point of sounding almost childlike. “Not than any of this is any of your—”
“And why, in this day and age, would a high-powered career woman like you take her husband’s name?”
“That’s a personal matter.”
Richard nodded in mock understanding. “Of course it is. So tell me, Miss Chan… sorry, Mrs Janzyck… how do you, personally, feel about China’s aggressive and expansionist plans for our moon?”
“Whose moon?” Maria asked.
Richard rubbed his hands together and laughed, smiling freely like the young man in the photograph he had held up a few minutes earlier. He then held his hands up, palms out to the crowd. “No further questions.”
“No,” Maria said, in something more like her usual firm voice. “I could rise above your prejudice if that’s what this was, but we both know it’s not. You’ve had decades worth of sensitivity and media training; you know better than to say these things, even if you think them.” Several of Maria’s fellow reporters nodded along with her words. “What you’re doing here is saying deliberately offensive things and making deliberately controversial statements to distract everyone from the real issue, and people can see through it.”
Richard’s expression changed in an instant. “That’s what you’re doing!” he said, feigning incredulity. “You and your puppet-masters with their tentacles all over our industries and our media… it’s you who is saying controversial things to distract us from the real issue, which is and always has been expansionist Chinese aggression.”
“That’s patently ridicul—”
“No!” Richard yelled, thumping the podium with his fist. “I won’t stand for it any longer. I have to get this off my chest. You can talk about media training… fine. I don’t care anymore.” He looked directly into the main camera in front of him. “Cut me off if you have to, but this is happening. I’m saying this. I’m 68 years old, and I’m sick and tired of watching the country I’ve defended for so long being torn apart from outside and in. China’s prerogative is China’s prerogative; fine.
“But Slater?” Richard continued, shaking his head in absolute disgust. “We might as well call her Valerie Chamberlain. Her administration, her recent predecessors, and indeed the nation’s political establishment as a whole, have all done nothing to curb Chinese expansion. We ignore and we appease them because we “need the trade”. Why do we need the trade? Because we don’t make anything anymore! Why don’t we make anything? Because we ship it all in from China, of course! And while China’s politicians are busy buying up swathes of Africa to source their raw materials more cheaply than we could ever hope to, our politicians are busy toeing party lines and dancing to the tune of a four-year cycle of empty promises and popularity contests.
“This is no sob story but you all know fine well that I had no family to fight for, so I fought for my country. I fought for its flag; its freedom; its forefathers. Slater and the rest? They fight for themselves. The individualism that made this country great has corrupted our political system to breaking point. These are the things I’m not supposed to say, but I care too much about this country to care about propriety.
“And I can’t deny that most of us who were around before Slater didn’t see China coming, because we were all too busy patting ourselves on the back for winning the cold war by default. Our Soviet enemy destroyed itself from within, just as China’s American enemy has been doing ever since.”
Ben Gold looked at the floor. He had known Richard for years and never seen him lose his cool like this.
“But one man saw China coming,” Richard sai
d, lowering his voice to a much calmer level. “Hans. Even before the wall came down, he knew that our biggest threat was the risk of being surpassed and overtaken by China and India. India hasn’t quiet followed the trajectory he expected, but China?” Richard paused, scanned the room, and shook his head in dejection. “We’re arguing about Nazi UFOs, and they’re going to Mars. Hans must be turning in his grave.”
Richard tucked the framed photograph under his arm and limped to the door. “See them all out, Benjamin,” he said.
D minus 27
Blitz Tower
Manhattan, New York
Among the tens of millions of viewers who tuned in for Richard Walker’s press conference was Jan Gellar, former Head of Content at Blitz News and current editor of The Daily Chat.
Jan and Richard had a long history, none of it friendly and some of it positively hostile. Their most recent interaction ended poorly for both, with the bugs Richard blackmailed Jan into ordering for Dan McCarthy’s home having been discovered within hours and since exposed on national TV.
The Kloster letter came at the perfect time for Jan and everyone else at Blitz, utterly capturing the media and public’s attention. Emma Ford gave the bugging footage an initial boost by releasing it to all news networks at once on Wednesday morning, but her promise of a bigger announcement that night reduced the footage to a side-story even before the letter was out.
The Blitz employee who had been caught red-handed wisely claimed to have been working on his own initiative when he planted the bugs. Blitz made a public show of terminating his contract, of course, but not without an under-the-table reward for his loyalty and silence.
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