Not Alone

by Falconer, Craig A.

  No one else said anything.

  Back in the van, Kyle was reluctant to reveal himself to the robbers. “They’ll be here any minute,” he said, trying to mollify Trey’s urgency.

  “Put on the damn lights,” Trey snapped at him. “They’ll panic and flee. You can drive away if you want, just hit the lights and honk the horn!”

  Kyle closed his eyes and hit the lights. The coward in him wanted to drive away as Trey had offered, but the newsman in him demanded to stay put; after all, Trey needed the van and its dish to broadcast the footage. As the lights bathed the street in a wash of yellow, he hammered on the horn to make as much noise as he could.

  Everyone in Italy, but Dan in particular, watched through their fingers.

  Trey zoomed in tighter on the SUVs. Only one man was in shot, busily loading a laptop into the back of one of the vehicles. He turned to the light, blinded, and shouted something about a federal operation; his voice was only intermittently audible amid Kyle’s rhythmic honking.

  “Oh, shit,” Trey said when he realised what was going on, a whole lot more audible and a whole lot more anxious than before. He jumped into the car. “Reverse, reverse!”

  Kyle didn’t need to be told twice.

  The late-night anchor on Blitz News apologised for Trey’s language as they cut away from the live getaway and immediately replayed the brief glimpse of a federal agent loading a laptop into a blacked-out SUV.

  Dan didn’t know what to say or do. For once he instinctively looked at Clark rather than Emma. Over the years, Dan had seen some looks in Clark’s eyes. But never anything like this.

  Nothing like this.

  “That was Dad’s computer,” Clark said, barely louder than a whisper. He cracked his knuckles and sat down on the empty couch. He balled his fists on the glass table like he was about to smash them through it, then took a deep breath. He exhaled, just as deeply, and finally turned to Dan. “Dan…” his voice croaked. “They were in Dad’s room.”

  “She’ll pay for this,” Emma said firmly. “I will fucking see to that.”

  After a few seconds of sharp, prickly silence, Timo had a question for whoever could answer it: “Where’s the folder?”

  “Across the street,” Emma answered quickly. She then looked to Clark. “They won’t raid Mr Byrd’s house, too, right?”

  “It’s not there,” Dan said before Clark could reply. “Mr Byrd gave it to Phil. He’s said Phil has a real vault where he keeps all his prepper stuff.”

  Emma breathed a sigh of relief. “As long as it’s more secure than Walker’s was.”

  “If there is anything I can do…” Timo said, leaving the offer hanging.

  Dan was the only one to acknowledge him, with a slight nod.

  “I’m going to try to get a hold of Jack,” Emma said, not anticipating much success. She walked into another room.

  Dan dropped himself onto the couch and looked up at the wood-panel ceiling. “So much for Cecil the lion,” he said.

  D minus 5

  Cattedrale di San Lorenzo

  Lugano, Switzerland

  Switzerland being another country for Clark to tick off his list was the only positive anyone voiced about their pre-arranged trip across the nearby border.

  No one was in the mood for smiling into cameras and Dan didn’t even have the energy to care enough to ask why they were visiting a cathedral.

  Emma had tried to reach Jack Neal several times since the raid on Dan’s house, but each time the same robotic voice greeted her with a message that the number she had dialled was no longer active. She said unusually little during the seventy-minute drive to Lugano.

  Upon the group’s arrival, the local media greeted them warmly. They fired questions to Dan, in English, about what he made of the sphere and the international team that had been assembled to assess it. No one said anything about the federal raid that understandably dominated Dan’s thoughts.

  This focus on the bigger issue — and the discovery of the Kerguelen sphere was just about as big as any issue could ever be — calmed Dan’s anger slightly. The raid felt like, and was, a gross personal violation. But more pertinently, it was an act of desperation.

  Dan had never subscribed to the asinine logic of people who said “if you’ve got nothing to hide, you’ve got nothing to fear”, but he took a measure of comfort from the fact that he genuinely did have nothing to hide. As soon as Slater and her snooping analysts went through their unjustly seized loot, they would realise that the whole exercise was a total bust and hang their heads in helplessness.

  Dan answered the media’s questions with a sprightlier tone than he would have thought possible just minutes earlier, telling them that he fully supported the unified international response and that it would be good practice for whatever kind of global decisions had to be made when the precise content of the sphere eventually came to light.

  When Timo showed Dan the tiny village he was born in, during the second of three media stops, a Swiss reporter finally broached the topic of the raid. The questioner asked, very generally, how Dan had reacted to the images and whether he was at all concerned about what might have been taken.

  Out of habit as much as anything, Dan looked to Emma for permission to speak about it. She nodded.

  “We were appalled,” Dan said. “I’m being treated like a criminal for telling the truth and refusing to lie down. Slater is desperate. She’s grasping at straws. She thought I had more evidence or another section of the Kloster letter. More info on what’s on the plaques or how to open the sphere. She said that.”

  “So there was a warning of this… ah… intrusion?”

  Dan looked to Emma again. She shook her head and mouthed “not yet”.

  “I’d rather focus on the sphere right now,” Dan said. “That’s what’s most important.”

  “Okay,” the reporter said, nodding respectfully. Timo raised a hand to make sure that the message not to push for further comment on Slater’s warning had been received. “But in any case, it seems to me, very much, that this action is a tacit admission from your US government that the sphere is…”

  “Alien,” Dan said, finishing the sentence exactly as the reporter had hoped he would.

  “Indeed. Perhaps President Slater is now thinking it is inevitable that the world will find out. Perhaps she—”

  “I don’t have any patience left for perhaps,” Dan deadpanned. “If Slater wants to come after me, fine. I’ll be home tomorrow and she knows where I live. But the time for lies has passed.”

  After a brief glance to Clark, who was nodding slightly with the same intense look on his face as when he saw the federal agent holding their father’s laptop, Dan then delivered the ad-libbed soundbite that would air on stations from Switzerland to Colorado for the rest of the day:

  “The world deserves a lot more than a tacit admission, and I won’t rest until we get it.”

  D minus 4

  White House

  Washington, D.C.

  Daylight slowly made its way across President Slater’s desk, reaching her computer’s screen to mark the end of a sleepless night and the beginning of what was sure to be her most testing day in office yet.

  Jack Neal sat next to her, rather than opposite as he usually did, so that both could watch the screen. They watched two news stations simultaneously, alternating which was muted every few minutes. One of the stations was Blitz News and the other a London-based network.

  Aside from the typical difference in tone, the content of the news differed greatly. On Blitz News and every other US station, the “midnight raid” on Dan McCarthy’s house utterly dominated the early morning news cycle. But in the UK — the country more obsessed with Dan’s personal story than any other outside of North America — the raid was only getting around five minutes per hour. Jack assured Slater that the raid had received even less coverage across continental Europe, where news outlets were focusing almost entirely on the sphere itself.

  The speculation o
n Blitz News, which Slater and Jack were listening to, centred around what the federal agents might have found. “Probably nothing,” was the general consensus, highlighting the level of trust people now had in Dan. The combative but confident comments he had just made in Switzerland further entrenched the expectation that he would come out of the raid clean.

  Camera-phone footage shot from the window of one of Dan’s neighbours showed agents searching the home directly across the street from his, where intelligence told them he had recently spent a night. The home’s owner cooperated fully with the agents, leading to no surprise when they emerged empty-handed.

  Slater doubted that Dan had taken the folder to Europe — he would have been showing it off if he had, she imagined — but as far as her chances of finding it went, he might as well have.

  When the call came through that preliminary searches on the two laptops had revealed nothing more relevant than Dan’s scans and translation of the Kloster letter — the creation and modification dates of which frustratingly corroborated his story — Jack Neal fought the urge to say “I told you so”.

  Jack took no pleasure whatsoever in Slater’s predicament, fully aware that his own future depended on hers, but sometimes her pigheadedness was too much for him to handle. Slater had always held the view that it was better to do something than nothing, and Jack’s best efforts to convince her otherwise had always come up short.

  There were two words Jack had used countless times in the twenty hours or so since the sphere was found: “damage” and “limitation”. But rather than try to mitigate against what was almost inevitably coming, Slater had done the opposite. With one foot already tied down by the sphere’s discovery, she had shot herself in the other.

  The argument immediately before Slater ordered the raid had been their fiercest ever. Jack’s position was best summed up by his concluding remark: “You can’t keep walking into machine-gun fire.”

  Slater, with the phone already in her hand, had looked him in the eye and responded calmly: “I’m not just going to close my eyes and hope for the best.”

  Now, hours after the raid and minutes after the call about the non-findings, President Slater stood up and walked to the window.

  “What now?” Jack asked half-heartedly.

  She turned to meet his eyes, failed to think of a reply, and meekly turned back to the window. After a few silent moments she sat back down.

  Jack didn’t ask again. Like Slater, he knew deep down that there was no “what now”. There was nothing left to do. Taking the sphere by force, which Jack knew must have crossed her mind in the same fleeting way it had crossed his own, was no real option. The kind of international incident that would have come from blatantly ignoring the restricted zone around Miramar would have been a minor tiff compared to the fallout of any kind of raid on mainland Argentina, let alone a raid on a site currently manned by government scientists from Beijing and Moscow.

  Closing their eyes and hoping for the best, as even Slater now saw, was all they could do.

  Even the unexpected late-night news that an American scientist had been belatedly invited to join the team of international observers failed to calm Slater’s mind. If anything, she felt scorned; she hadn’t even known of the diplomatic negotiations until they were over. As far as she understood, the Argentine government had been made aware of the political and economic costs of actively excluding the United States from the team. But the fact that Slater herself was excluded from this process confirmed in her mind that those around her were preparing for life without her.

  Aside from this personal slight, Slater also failed to see how she could derive any personal benefit from the American presence. The scientist who was sent, as per the initial rules agreed between Argentina, Norway and the UK, was chosen by an internal selection process within each country’s foremost scientific association. These rules were thrown together in minutes and served only to ensure that the international team was composed of scientists rather than politicians.

  The rapidity of the negotiation and selection processes gave Slater no opportunity to converse with NASA’s chosen representative; no chance to deliver a direct order to somehow delay the opening of the sphere; no chance to do anything other than close her eyes and hope for the best.

  It would have been futile, anyway, Slater conceded. Like all who saw the world in scientific absolutes rather than political subtleties, the scientist whose name Slater didn’t even recognise would have no doubt wanted the sphere to be opened as soon as possible. The scientist was no doubt one of the hundreds of millions of Americans who cared more about a historic moment for their species than a career-ending embarrassment for their president.

  Slater didn’t fully grasp why William Godfrey hadn’t raised a vocal objection to an American presence on “his” team, but right now she had too little emotional energy to waste any of it on someone like him.

  Another firm rule regarding the ongoing analysis of the Kerguelen sphere was that no national representative could have any contact with their government during the testing. Slater didn’t even know where the scientists and the sphere were.

  “Some kind of cave or mountain” was all anyone had been able to tell her. She knew this had to be bullshit; with the number of satellites in orbit and agents on the ground the intelligence services had, there was no conceivable way that the sphere could have been transported to a secret location without someone seeing it. And that was before even considering how trivial it would have been to track the NASA scientist’s movements.

  Slater’s paranoia only grew with such thoughts. She couldn’t trust the intelligence agencies. Had she never been able to trust them, or had they just given up on her? Whichever it was, it led to the lamentable situation in which she now found herself: getting her updates from the news.

  Worse still, she knew it would continue like this. The results from the first round of experiments on the Kerguelen sphere were due in around ten hours and would be released in the form of a written statement issued simultaneously in seven languages. No national governments — even Argentina’s, if the official line was to be believed — would see the results before the public. The international team of scientists was “above politics” and would deliver only the facts, free from spin and free from agendas.

  Slater took no comfort from knowing that the other seven represented governments would be as out of the loop as she was. That wasn’t the point. The real point — the only point — was her personal helplessness.

  Conventional wisdom had it that the President of the United States was the most powerful person in the world.

  But as Valerie Slater sat silently next to Jack Neal, watching the same news coverage as billions of ordinary people from Albania to Zimbabwe, the last thing she felt was powerful.

  D minus 3

  Lake Maggiore

  Ispra, Italy

  Dan’s public proclamation that he would be home on Friday took everyone by surprise, not least Emma and Clark.

  Clark immediately voiced his support for returning early in the wake of the raid and, more generally, the sphere’s discovery.

  Eventually, Emma agreed. Her attempts to convince Dan to stay until Sunday included revealing that a visit to Lake Toplitz in Austria was planned for Saturday. But when she saw that even this didn’t excite Dan, she knew it was time to leave.

  Emma looked for upcoming flights home. Frankfurt was still their only option since nowhere else would take them straight to Denver and everyone agreed that it was better to have the connection in Europe — where the media gave Dan some breathing room — than it would have been to fly from Milan and have an inevitably chaotic connection in New York.

  “There’s a flight from Frankfurt in eleven hours,” she said, “then no more until the one we’re already booked for in two days. How long would it take to drive to Frankfurt?”

  “Too long,” Timo said. “Europe’s not that small.”

  “Surely we can fly?” Dan said.

&nbs
p; Timo was already dialling his general assistant to sort it out. “Milan to Frankfurt,” he said, sticking to English. “When? As soon as they can.” He then called for Emma’s phone and read the details on the screen. “It has to be in time for the Frankfurt to Denver International at 11:30 CET.”

  Dan couldn’t hear the other side of Timo’s call, but he got the gist of it from Timo’s response.

  “No, just three,” Timo said. “I’m not going further than Frankfurt.”

  The next pause was much longer.

  After listening carefully, Timo looked at Emma. “There’s only two seats from Frankfurt,” he told her.

  “No way,” Clark said. “It’s all of us or none of us.” This wasn’t negotiable; he wouldn’t let Dan out of his sight and he knew they would drown without Emma.

  “Look for options and stay on the line,” Timo said. He then held the phone against his chest and flitted his eyes between Emma and Clark, no longer sure who was in charge.

  “We’re booked on Sunday’s flight, anyway,” Emma said.

  “No,” Dan said, bypassing Emma and talking directly to Timo. “I don’t want Sunday’s flight. I thought the whole point of having a private jet was that you could go where you want, when you want. Why can’t we go straight to Colorado Springs from Milan? Can your jet go that far without refuelling?”

  “Is it less than 13,000 kilometres?”

  They all looked at him blankly.

  “8,000 miles?” Timo said, trying again.

  “Definitely less than that,” Clark said. “But COS isn’t an international airport. Customs wouldn’t—”

  “And we drove to Denver, anyway,” Emma interrupted. “We have to get the car.”

  The room fell silent for a few seconds.

  “So can we not just go Milan to Denver?” Dan asked whoever was listening.