“Yeah.”
“Jesus,” Clark said to himself. “Carrying Dan to bed and watching the news until I fall asleep. I’m turning into my dad after she left.”
Emma wouldn’t have had a clue what to say to that, so she was glad that Clark reached the house and disappeared inside before she had to think of something.
The first thing Clark saw on the news — other than the countless replays of the day’s biggest moments from the discovery at Miramar, the ballsy display at the Municipal Hall, Godfrey’s reaction in London, and Dan’s own reaction at the Cavalieri Observatory — was a more muted reaction from Billy Kendrick. Speaking from outside the arena in Charlotte where he was about to start the final show of his tour before his ET Weekender in Myrtle Beach, Billy joked that for the first time in his life he was hoping that Disclosure could be postponed for a few more days.
It would be “cosmically right” for the sphere to be opened and the big announcement to come when he and over 20,000 other ET enthusiasts were already gathered for a party, Billy said. In his own half-serious words: “Dan got to be at the observatory when the sphere turned up, so it’s only fair that I get to be at my party when they finally open it and tell us what’s inside.”
After the most event- and announcement-packed day since the leak, very little fresh information was now being revealed on Blitz News. The repetitiveness of the cycle and lack of English-language alternatives sent Clark to sleep after only an hour or so. Before long, Emma caught herself drifting off, too. Not knowing what Thursday might bring, she decided to call it a night and catch up on any overnight developments in the morning.
Emma drifted quickly to sleep only to be awakened by her phone after what felt like no time at all. The time on her screen told her that over three hours had in fact passed, but that was nothing compared to the surprise of who was calling and what they wanted.
“Wait a minute,” Emma said after a brief argument with the caller. She hurried to the living room, but Clark wasn’t there. She found him fast asleep in his room, on top of the bed rather than in it.
“Clark,” she called.
He didn’t react.
“Clark!”
Still nothing.
Emma flicked the light-switch beside the door on and off to rouse him. It worked.
“Hmmm?” he said, startled by the strobe-like effect. “What’s going on?”
“You need to get up,” Emma said.
With the room’s light now bright and steady, Clark could see the look on Emma’s face. He jumped off the bed with sudden urgency. “Where’s Dan? Did something happen?”
“Dan’s fine,” Emma reassured him. She held her phone out, inviting Clark to take it.
“Is it my dad?” Clark asked, too panicked to question why such a call would be received on Emma’s phone rather than his.
Emma shook her head. “It’s President Slater,” she said. “She wants to talk to you.”
D minus 8
White House
Washington, D.C.
“She put me on hold?” President Slater asked Jack Neal incredulously, her eyes flicking between Jack’s and the phone on her desk.
“She put me on hold,” Jack said. This was more accurate, since Emma hadn’t actually spoken to the President.
With the address provided by Ben Gold having led to an empty house rather than Richard Walker, and with Ben now refusing to say anything beyond “I’ve told you everything I know,” President Slater demanded that Jack Neal call Emma Ford to arrange a one-on-one conversation with Dan McCarthy.
Jack tried to tell Slater that Dan didn’t know anything else, going so far as to reveal everything about his night in Colorado, right down to the part where he was locked in an office to ensure that he couldn’t interfere in the night’s event. Slater wouldn’t hear it. She considered Jack’s trust in Emma misplaced and believed he saw only what he wanted to see in her. He didn’t see the truth, she said: that Emma Ford was a lying, manipulative snake.
President Slater had no interest in talking to Emma and Jack had little doubt that the feeling was mutual. But if Slater could only talk to McCarthy directly, she insisted, she could get to the truth. The hope she clung on to was that he had some other piece of evidence tucked away, just as he’d kept the Kloster letter quiet for so long. In Slater’s punch-drunk mind, this unpublished evidence could be anything from a photograph of the plaques to a redacted passage from the letter. McCarthy might know exactly what the two surviving alien plaques said, or at least how to open the sphere to get into them.
This day from hell had left Valerie Slater as a political leper with only Richard Walker for company in the docks of the court of public opinion. She understood perfectly well that she couldn’t keep the wolves at the door for much longer if the nation’s reputation and position continued to diminish under her leadership. Getting something — anything — from McCarthy was the only hope she had left.
Emma Ford’s excuses as to why she couldn’t give the phone to Dan angered Slater greatly, but Jack had tried to reason with Emma. “I’ve held this call off for as long as I could,” he’d told her, sounding like he meant it. “But this won’t just go away.”
“She can talk to Clark,” Emma had said.
When Slater nodded, Jack passed the message on.
But now, on Emma’s end of the line, Clark was point-blank refusing to talk to Slater.
“I really think you should,” Emma told him. “Just to say we don’t know anything else.”
“Why? What’s she going to do? Invade Italy and arrest us? Even if we were at home, she can’t touch us. You said that yourself.”
“I know what I said, but Jack is saying—”
“Fuck Jack,” Clark said.
Emma tried to stay calm. “Clark, I’m asking you to do this. Please.”
“And I’m telling you I won’t,” he replied. “No way. And don’t even think about waking Dan.”
“You mean Dan who’s still passed out, shit-faced on sambuca?”
“Slater and Jack are in your head,” Clark said. “Just hang up, turn your phone off, and we’ll deal with this in the morning.”
“This isn’t something we can deal with tomorrow.”
“Well we’re not dealing with it now. If you want to tell them we don’t know anything else, then by all means tell them. I don’t know why it makes any difference who says it, anyway.”
“Me neither,” Emma said. She left Clark at his bedroom door, not wanting Slater’s sudden tetchiness to drive any wedges between them.
Emma pressed a button on her phone to take Jack off hold and return to the call.
“Finally,” he said. “Did you at least get Clark?”
“Whatever Slater wants to ask, she can ask me.”
Clark heard Emma standing up for herself and walked into the living room to sit beside her. She saw him and didn’t mind.
“Emma,” Jack continued, “she won’t let this go.”
In the absolute silence of the night, Clark could easily hear both sides of the call.
“Give her the phone,” Emma demanded. “We’re eight hours ahead; if Slater wants to wake us up in the middle of the night then she can at least have the decency to do her own talking.”
“She won’t speak to you. If you could just get Clark to—”
“Jack, give her the fucking phone!”
“Here I am,” President Slater’s voice announced quietly but firmly into Emma’s ear. “I can hear you.”
For a moment, Emma was silent; she had spoken to presidents before, but never Slater and never in a confrontation. At this time of night, and after all that had happened, it was a lot to deal with. Eventually, she forced out a question: “What do you want?”
“What do you have?” Slater replied.
“At this time of night, very little patience,” Emma said, casting her nerves aside.
Slater affected a chuckle. “I knew we weren’t so different. But really, what else was in the Kerguele
n folder?”
“Nothing.”
“Nothing?”
“Nothing.”
President Slater paused. “You don’t think I buy the narrative you’ve been spinning, do you? You don’t really expect me to believe you weren’t sitting on the Bonn video and everything else all along?”
“I can’t control what you believe. I’m telling you the truth. Take it or leave it.”
“Listen to me, you little shit,” Slater snapped back. “If you and those two idiots won’t offer your help, we very well fucking will take it. Do you understand the kind of consequen—”
“Valerie, enough!” Jack Neal yelled. He lifted his phone from the desk and walked outside the room with it.
“Jack?” Emma said.
“I’m here,” he said, breathing heavily. “I don’t know where her mind is. She’s in survival mode. She’s desperate, Emma, and desperate people do stupid things.”
“What else has she said?”
“Well, I don’t know how serious she is, but she’s been talking about taking the—”
“Get back in here now!” Slater screamed at Jack from her doorway.
Her booming command physically startled Clark, 5,000 miles from the source and halfway across the room from the phone. He couldn’t imagine how it must have hit Jack.
“I have to go,” Jack whispered.
And just like that, the call was over.
“What’s Slater going to do?” Clark asked.
“I don’t know,” Emma said, uttering those three helpless words she hated more than any others. “But I’m glad we’re in Italy.”
THURSDAY
D minus 7
Drive-In
Birchwood, Colorado
At 1am in Birchwood, Kyle Young was the only news reporter still awake. Most of the international reporters who had flooded in days after the initial leak stayed in hotels in the city, while others slept in their huge vehicles. The drive-in was much better lit than it had been at first thanks to Phil Norris’s investment in floodlights — paid for by a small parking levy — but the hours between 11pm and 4am were still extremely quiet. Even Kyle’s cameraman, who was being paid by the hour, had drifted off.
Maria Janzyck, Kyle’s better-known and more experienced ACN colleague, had recently decided to uproot to the encampment at the IDA building in Colorado Springs. With Dan McCarthy still out of the country and Richard Walker’s whereabouts still unknown, it seemed more likely that the next significant development would occur at the IDA building rather than in Birchwood. And so it was that second-string Kyle was on drive-in duty for the night.
Having spent several lonely hours hoping that something would happen, Kyle Young was about to get his wish.
The first sign that something was wrong came when the dull glow of streetlights outside the drive-in faded for a few seconds before quickly returning. Though none of the streetlights were directly visible from the drive-in, the quick off-and-on flash registered in Kyle’s peripheral vision.
Since Kyle was in Maria’s usual spot next to Trey and the scaffold stage, he decided to quietly climb up the steps to the stage so he could look over the wall towards Birchwood’s residential streets. He reached the high chain-link door at the bottom of the steps. It was locked.
Kyle walked to the edge of the drive-in to look along the road. As he neared the threshold, a black SVU drove past. The vehicle, slow and eerily silent, had no plates. Kyle stopped walking. Seconds later, another identical vehicle crept past in the same townward direction.
“What the shit?” Kyle said to himself.
He looked around the drive-in to check whether anyone else had seen the cars. There was no one in sight.
Kyle ran back to the ACN news van. His network-assigned cameraman was asleep in the passenger seat. Kyle turned on the engine, begging it to be quiet as he dreamt of the scoop that might be waiting for him wherever the mysterious SUVs were heading. He took a sip from one of the two coffee cups in the van’s cup-holder. It wasn’t hot, but it was better than nothing.
The refreshing hit of the coffee gave Kyle momentary pause. He looked out of his window at Trey’s Blue Dish Network van, which looked like a travelling salesman’s compared to some of the colossal satellite trucks and network vans parked at the other side of the drive-in lot. Trey had bought the two coffees for Kyle from the small stand in the corner of the lot to help him stay awake during his night shift, asking in exchange only for Kyle to wake him if anything happened.
Kyle didn’t know what it was, but he knew that something had happened. Blacked-out SUVs with no plates didn’t drive through Nowhere, USA towns like Birchwood in the middle of the night for no reason. He wouldn’t call Trey a friend, but they had spent a lot of time talking over the last few days, and Trey was one of the few people who knew of Kyle’s role in unearthing the incriminating footage of Hans Kloster giving Richard Walker the letter which had ultimately led to the discovery of the sphere. Kyle knew that Trey’s unbroken vigil at the drive-in was unmatched, even surpassing the old guy in Argentina who had been all over the news for spotting the sphere through his binoculars after staring at the sea for seven days straight. Kyle left his engine running but stepped out of his van.
He knocked on Trey’s window, startling him awake, then quickly explained what had happened. As soon as Kyle mentioned the gate-like door at the bottom of the stage’s steps being locked, Trey handed him the key that Emma had given him for safe keeping. He hurried over to the door with Kyle, listening to the rest of the story on the way.
“What way were the cars going?” he asked.
“Towards the town,” Kyle said.
“And where did the lights go out?”
Kyle shrugged. “I just saw some lights dim then come back. I don’t know how to describe it… sort of like a slow flash.”
Trey reached the top of the steps first. He walked onto the stage and looked over the wall towards the rest of Birchwood. In the distance, a small line of streetlights were out. The lights on either side were working normally and the area affected look too small to be a result of any kind of power outage.
“Why would the lights go out in such a small area?” Kyle asked.
“They didn’t go out. Someone put them out.”
Kyle pulled his eyes away from the odd sight and looked at Trey, who was staring out at Birchwood with the troubled expression of a farmer surveying storm damage. “Why would someone put them out?”
“Because that dark spot is where the cars are going,” Trey said. “That dark spot is where Dan lives.”
D minus 6
Lake Maggiore
Ispra, Italy
At 9am in Italy, Dan McCarthy couldn’t believe what he was watching.
“Claaaark!” he shouted in the general direction of the bathroom. Emma and Timo stood beside him, watching the rustic living room’s TV with similar if less frenzied trepidation.
Emma’s anger at Timo over the previous night’s pool incident had already been wholly superseded by her stress over the phone call from Jack Neal and President Slater that had come a few hours later.
Clark heard Dan over the sound of the shower. He knew it wasn’t a “they opened the sphere” scream. No doubt about it: this was a “something bad just happened” scream. He grabbed his towel from the rail and sprinted through to the living room.
Timo turned to look at him. Emma and Dan remained focused on the TV.
“Who’s driving that car?” Clark asked.
“The guy from ACN,” Emma said. “Kyle. It’s his news van.”
Clark watched the first-person view as the van sped along his hometown streets. He then heard Kyle’s voice repeating the situation: from his position at the drive-in, Kyle had just seen two blacked-out SUVs heading towards Dan McCarthy’s house, and the street lights in the immediate area had just gone out.
“They’re going to raid the house,” Clark said. He briefly met Emma’s eyes then started pacing around the room, hands on his head. �
��She sent the fucking Feds.”
“Who did?” Timo asked.
“You didn’t tell them?” Clark said to Emma.
This finally pulled Dan’s attention from the TV. “Tell us what?”
“Jack called last night,” Emma sighed. “I spoke to Slater.”
“What? What did she say?”
“She thinks you have more evidence you haven’t published yet. She said if we didn’t offer our help, she would take it.”
“Why didn’t you wake me?” Dan protested.
Clark jumped in. “You were totally out of it. And I heard everything Emma said: she just told Slater we were telling the truth, then Slater snapped and started making threats.”
Dan stood speechless. On the TV, the ACN van drew nearer to the house. Kyle continued to talk as he drove while Trey held his camera, footage from which he was simultaneously sending to ACN and Blitz News. Kyle’s ACN-appointed cameraman remained at the drive-in having refused to break his “strict orders” to stay there until the end of his shift. Fortunately for Kyle, Trey was adept at handling a camera and had been able to quickly hook everything up for a live mobile broadcast.
When the van got near enough to see the two SUVs parked outside the house, Kyle stopped and dialled 911. He had turned off the van’s headlights before the final turn into Dan’s street, knowing that any moving light would alert the group of criminals they were about to catch red-handed.
Trey kept filming. He tried to zoom in, but there was so little light that the picture suffered too much. He stepped outside, hoping that the camera would pick up more when the view was unobstructed by glass. He opened the door again quickly and quietly. “Put the lights on,” he whispered. “They’re loading up the cars with Dan’s stuff. The police will be too late.”
“No no no no no,” Clark said. “That’s Trey’s voice.”
Dan put his hands in front of his eyes and watched through his fingers. “He’s going to get himself killed.”
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