Not Alone

by Falconer, Craig A.

  She began to think about how small the world really was, and how little basis in reality things like borders and politics and PR really had. Billy Kendrick had been right, she thought: it was all about power. Richard Walker, like Hans Kloster before him, had dedicated decades of his life to hiding a global truth for the sake of national power. Men like Kloster and Walker had shaped humanity’s recent past, but they were no longer in control of its future.

  Now, the truth was out of their hands.

  And soon, for better or for worse, the power would be, too.

  Part 4

  The Lake

  “Truth will ultimately prevail

  where pains are taken to bring it to light.”

  George Washington

  MONDAY

  D minus 22

  Frankfurt Airport

  Frankfurt, Germany

  As a sizeable but orderly crowd of Germans greeted Dan’s arrival with English chants of “Truth, Truth, Now Now Now!”, Emma encouraged him to smile for as many photos as he could manage and to pose with some of the children.

  She also encouraged him to say “danke” before continuing towards the pre-arranged meeting point with Timo. Dan said it, and those close enough to hear smiled in appreciation of his effort, however limited it had been.

  Guided by written instructions on her phone, Emma then led the way to Timo. Dan spotted him first, walking towards them with a smile on his face.

  “I’m so glad you could make it,” Timo said to Dan, the excitement in his voice leaving no doubt that he meant it. He quickly greeted Clark and Emma, who he’d already spoken to several times, before returning to Dan. “You’ve done more to bring us within touching distance of the truth in two weeks than I’ve managed in ten years.”

  Dan shrugged modestly, slightly intimidated by Timo’s presence. “I was in the right place at the right time,” he said.

  “You were the right person in the right place at the right time,” Timo corrected him, holding his hand in the direction of his private jet. “Very few people would have taken the steps you took.”

  The group of four walked towards the jet and ascended the steps. “Mind your head,” Timo said, grinning. “The door wasn’t built for giants.”

  It didn’t take long for Clark to like Timo; he had an easy way about him and had after all paid for their flights and gone out of his way to accommodate them. The aircraft’s stylish interior was much smaller than Clark had imagined, with space for just eight passengers.

  Dan sat next to Timo, leaving Emma and Clark to choose their own seats.

  Emma felt more at ease then she had on the first flight thanks to the lack of ocean between Frankfurt and Milan.

  Clark enjoyed his legroom as he looked down on Germany, where he had long ago spent many happy days stationed in Stuttgart.

  Dan and Timo, meanwhile, talked extensively about the bigger picture. Dan’s feelings of intimidation quickly faded as he came to appreciate just how deep Timo’s interest was.

  Timo answered all of Dan’s questions about his investment in SETI observatories, promising to take Dan to the largest of them — only a few hundred miles from their lakeside base — at some point before the end of his stay.

  Timo then asked some questions of his own, chiefly seeking Dan’s view on why no US government workers had yet come forward to claim his astronomical $100,000,000 reward.

  “There’s no one to come forward,” Dan said. “No one else knows.”

  “No one?”

  Dan shook his head.

  “So there can be no more evidence?”

  “We don’t need more evidence. What we need now is the proof.”

  “The sphere?” Timo asked. “But how sure are you that it’s still there? Richard Walker could have found it, or Kloster. He lived another nineteen years after giving that letter to Walker.”

  Dan had contended with this pessimistic scenario several times, but he’d always tried to push it out of his mind before it could settle. The previous night, though, with his mind still rattled by the mass suicide at Hemshaw, the thought had troubled him for hours. The upside of this was that his mind eventually came up with an answer that quelled his doubts.

  “They couldn’t have found it by themselves,” Dan said. “They would have needed a boat, and a crew, and permission to be in Argentina’s waters, and all sorts of other things. But the crew by itself is enough to seal it, because one of them would have come forward by now; whatever Walker might have paid for their silence, it can’t have been anything like what you’re offering for the truth. And even if they weren’t strictly government employees, they would have still tried to claim the reward. Especially now that Walker is pretty much a pariah.”

  “So you do think there’s a slight chance that the sphere isn’t still in the sea?” Timo asked, surprising Dan by taking that from his answer.

  “No. I was just saying that even if you think there’s a chance Walker found it, it would still turn up.”

  Timo paused. He looked out of the window, Italy now beneath them. “I have to say, Dan, I fear that it’s either in the sea or lost for good.”

  “It’s in the sea,” Dan reassured him. “Argentina didn’t even start the real search until yesterday.”

  Timo nodded, as though trying to convince himself. “My mother used to say I worried for no reason,” he said, massaging his chin with his thumb and index finger. “Let’s hope she was right.”

  D minus 21

  Seafront

  Miramar, Argentina

  Slightly fewer citizens crowded the promenade at Miramar on Monday morning than had on Sunday, with many of the weekend sea-watchers now back at work.

  Miguel Perez, an elderly man who had held a coveted front-row spot for five days, continued his patient vigil. Though the young father and daughter who kept him company on Sunday were unfortunately nowhere to be seen today, Miguel had a smile for the TV reporter who fought her way through the crowd to ask him for a few words.

  Frequent news reports from the same point of the promenade had made Miguel a common sight to viewers throughout Argentina, and this modicum of celebrity was enough to earn him a gift from the reporter: a pair of binoculars, gaudily branded with her station’s “ADLTV” logo but markedly more powerful than the plastic pair Miguel had purchased from a street vendor on Friday.

  The brief interview with Miguel offered a change of pace in the Argentine news coverage, which otherwise focused on the various techniques employed by the naval teams who spent much of Sunday searching for the sphere and would soon resume for another long shift.

  Juan Silva, the regional Coast Guard now firmly established as the visible face of the search and something of a de facto spokesman for the entire Argentine government, had appeared on television minutes earlier to describe some of the more sophisticated underwater imaging techniques being used. He also revealed that experienced divers were operating in the restricted zone as part of the official search team.

  But most excitingly for viewers and those at the seafront, Juan confirmed that powerful magnets would be used for the first time on Monday afternoon to aid in the search.

  “These are exciting times for Argentina,” Juan said, “and exciting times for the world.”

  Whether in Miramar, Birchwood or Milan, few could disagree.

  D minus 20

  Lake Maggiore

  Ispra, Italy

  Timo Fiore’s regular Italian residence lay in the town of Varese, thirty miles northwest of Milan. The lakeside villa in Ispra where Dan’s group would spend the next six nights was nestled on the southeast shore of Lake Maggiore, a further eleven miles or so west of Varese.

  “Lakes are way better than mountains,” Emma said as they walked through the elevated villa’s back door and out to its crystal blue pool, the edge of which was a literal stone’s throw from the lake and a long way from Colorado.

  Dan looked around, trying to make sense of the luxurious surroundings. The best he could do was liken t
he scene to something from a TV commercial for exotic honeymoons.

  The majesty continued inside, where an ultramodern metal and glass kitchen sat in stark contrast to a rustic main living area with polished wood panels on the ceiling, irregular tiling on the floor, and exposed grey brickwork on the walls.

  There were five bedrooms, each with high ceilings and three with wall-length glass doors allowing near-infinite natural light. Clark joked that the larger of the two master bedrooms was bigger than their house in Birchwood. After a few seconds, he stopped laughing and realised that it actually was.

  The time difference would take some serious getting used to, so Timo showed the group where everything was and prepared to leave them for the night.

  “You’re not staying?” Dan asked.

  The question caught Timo off guard. “I hadn’t planned on it,” he said. “But I suppose I could.”

  “We’ll be fine,” Clark butted in. “But if your other place is better than this, I want to see it.”

  “Tomorrow,” Timo smiled. “And Emma, we can iron out a plan in the morning for the media activities.”

  “Yup,” she said.

  Dan didn’t know or particularly care what specific media activities Timo was talking about — he trusted Emma completely and couldn’t see any room for ulterior motive’s on Timo’s part — but he was keen to nail down a day and time for his visit to the SETI observatory. He asked Timo about it.

  “Maybe Wednesday?” Timo suggested unsurely, looking at Emma rather than Dan. She shrugged. “Hopefully Wednesday,” he said to Dan. “Thursday at the latest.”

  “Sounds good,” Dan said, excited already.

  Timo told them all that the kitchen had been stocked for their arrival, joking that he’d told his property manager to “prepare for three American-sized appetites.” Emma and Dan laughed, but Clark, whose daily caloric intake was usually greater than theirs combined, was glad to hear it.

  After an outdoor dinner of burgers and fries timed to coincide with a sunset no one knew how to describe, Clark was the first to stand up and stretch. “Jaws 2?” he suggested, inspired by the vast expanse of Lake Maggiore.

  Emma and Dan both agreed and walked into the welcoming living room.

  “It’s region-locked,” Clark said a few minutes later, having tried and failed to get the entertainment system to accept his American disc.

  Dan tried powering the system off and turning it back on with the disc already in, but this predictably made no difference. While he and Clark argued about what to try next, Emma picked up the remote and entered a button combination she found within seconds by searching online for the entertainment system’s model number. A blue-screen menu appeared, in English, allowing Emma to select Region 1.

  “Man of the house,” she said, mockingly pumping her fist.

  Halfway through the movie, during a lull in the action before the next big moment, Clark turned to Emma. “You know that the lake outside is salt water, right?” he said.

  Emma kept her eyes on the screen. “Shut up, it is not.”

  “And you know that sharks can jump when they’re hungry, right?”

  “Clark,” Dan said, “shut up.”

  “What? It’s not my fault if you’re both scared of sharks.”

  “If you’re not scared of sharks, you’re an idiot,” Dan said with authority.

  Clark screwed up his face and shrugged. “I’m not scared of anything.”

  Emma laughed out loud, then kept laughing. Still in charge of the remote, she paused the movie to avoid missing anything. “Hurr, I’m not scared of anything,” she said, aping Clark’s words and tone. “That’s the kind of line most big brothers spit when they’re 10, not 30. What’s next, who can hold his breath the longest?”

  “Easy there,” Clark said. “There’s only one person in this cabin on the wrong side of 30, and their last name ain’t McCarthy.”

  “Do you want to wake up with the sharks?” Emma said, her expression somewhere between involuntary amusement and offence. “Because that’s how you wake up with the sharks.” She pressed play to resume the movie.

  “I know something he’s scared of”, Dan said after a few seconds.

  “And what’s that?”

  “Aliens.”

  “Pfft,” Clark dismissed.

  “You always have been. That’s why you always told me they weren’t real; you didn’t want them to be.”

  “Bullshit.” Clark looked at Emma and tilted his head towards the TV, encouraging her to press play again.

  “Really?” Dan said. “So was Dad lying when he told me about the time when you were 9, and you and Tom Nelson snuck into the movies to see Alien: Resurrection then ran home crying?”

  “Do you want me to kick your ass?” Clark said, standing up.

  Dan shrugged. “If you want. Your tough-guy card expires when the aliens arrive, so you might as well get some use out of it while you can.”

  Emma had never seen or heard Dan be anything like this cocky or caustic; it really was as though being together in an unfamiliar place had regressed his and Clark’s relationship into something like a teenage pissing contest.

  Clark couldn’t help but grin at Dan’s comeback. He cracked his knuckles and sat down.

  “The real ones aren’t hostile, anyway,” Emma chimed in, tying to put the pointless discussion to bed.

  “Well…” Dan said teasingly.

  Emma sighed.

  “Well what?” Clark asked.

  Dan sat up and looked over at him. “Did you hear what I said on Focus 20/20? The thing about sharks and aliens?”

  “What thing?”

  “Drop it,” Emma said to both of them, but mainly Dan.

  Dan ignored her. “Basically that it makes sense to be scared of sharks, because you can stay out of the water. But with aliens, there’s nowhere to run. Because, you know, you can’t hide from the sky.”

  “Seriously!” Emma snapped. “Shut up. You made your point.”

  “It’s okay,” Dan said. “He’s not scared of anything.”

  Clark stood up and walked out to the pool, muttering as he went: “When did you turn into such an asshole?”

  “They’re definitely not hostile,” Dan said to Emma. “I was just—”

  “Shhh.” Emma pressed play and watched the rest of Jaws 2 in silence.

  Outside, under a perfect crescent moon, Clark looked out at Lake Maggiore and imagined how incredible it must have been to see the sphere levitate out of Lake Namtso in Tibet.

  Dan messing with his head and talking about hostility had Clark wondering for the first time whether it might be better if the Kerguelen sphere didn’t turn up in Argentina, where he knew the government was now using powerful magnets and sophisticated underwater imaging to aid their search.

  But Clark quickly came to his senses. He knew, assuming Hans Kloster had interpreted it correctly, that one of the two surviving plaques would tell the world when the Messengers would return. Whether this ended up being advance notice or advance warning, Clark decided it was better to know when they were coming.

  He stared up at the moon as it dangled on an invisible string, glistening on the lake like a disco ball.

  Friendly or hostile… it was better to know.

  D minus 19

  White House

  Washington, D.C.

  As the sun went down over the White House, President Slater and Jack Neal remained huddled around Slater’s desk.

  The sheet of A4 paper facing Jack, complete with the title “IDEAS” roughly underlined several times, looked like it would have been more at home in a high-school study group than an emergency meeting between the President of the United States and her most trusted and media-savvy advisor.

  All diplomatic attempts to slow the Argentine search had proven fruitless, with the US encroachment into the restricted zone late on Saturday night having seemingly stiffened Argentina’s resolve and closed the door on the already slim prospect of cooperation.


  Prior to that incident, President Slater had been blindsided by the mass suicide at Hemshaw. The tragedy initially acted as a macabre distraction, tearing the media’s attention away from Friday night’s unwelcome double whammy of Blitz News revelations.

  What had started with a worried whisper from Jack some ten days ago in Paris was now a 24-hour nightmare for President Slater, who found it nigh on impossible to conduct her regular daily duties with Dan McCarthy’s media circus still going strong and Richard Walker’s cloud of lies hanging over her.

  The whole thing was Walker’s fault, and Slater stewed over this thought every few minutes.

  Friday night’s dual development — absolute proof that Walker ordered Blitz Media to harass McCarthy and absolute proof that McCarthy had been telling the truth from the start — hastened Argentina’s response. Zonal restrictions on Friday turned into a full-blown official search over the weekend, and Monday brought with it the introduction of the kind of powerful magnets that Hans Kloster himself had suggested using to recover the sphere.

  Slater’s chief hope now was that Richard Walker, whether before or after Kloster’s death in 2007, had already found the Kerguelen sphere and destroyed it as Kloster urged in the letter. This hope was helping Slater through her days, but she knew that she couldn’t afford to bank on it. With that in mind, she lifted her eyes from the depressingly blank paper and looked up at Jack.

  “Forget ideas for reopening a dialogue with Buenos Aires,” she said. “Let’s focus on how we can find the sphere on our own without causing an international incident.”

  “We can’t,” Jack said definitively.