Ben’s expression softened, as though he hadn’t given this possibility as much consideration as he now realised it deserved. Despite how long he’d known Richard for, and as disturbed as it sounded, Ben knew that this would definitely be a better scenario than finding the house empty.
“You think he’s there?” Emma asked.
Clark shrugged. “One way to find out.”
Evidently in agreement, Emma walked over to Dan’s door and knocked. “We’re going to look for Walker,” she called in. She pressed her ear against the door then turned to Clark and mouthed the words: “he’s crying.”
“I’m coming in,” Clark announced. Upon opening the door he immediately turned his head in disgust at the sight — and more so the smell — of a puddle of vomit on Dan’s floor.
Clark held his nose and looked in again. He saw Dan curled up in a fetal position on his bed, sobbing into a pillow he held against his face.
“We’re going to look for Walker,” Clark said. He stopped deliberately short of sharing his recent suspicion that Walker might have died rather than been taken, which would mean that they might not be in too much trouble after all. Clark kept this to himself for now because he knew that the consequences of being so utterly duped weren’t why Dan was so upset. In lieu of saying anything else, Clark simply sat next to Dan and placed a hand on his back.
Emma appeared a minute or so later with a mop and a bucket.
“Thanks,” Clark said. “But you don’t have to do it.”
Emma looked over at Dan. He had always been fragile — she knew that from the start — but now he was broken. She shook her head at Clark. “It’s okay. You stay there.”
Dan sat up slowly, roused by the natural embarrassment that came with showing so much vulnerability. “I’ll clean it up,” he croaked.
“No you won’t,” Clark said. He helped Dan to his feet and past the almost impressively wide puddle. “Come on through to the kitchen and we’ll get you some water.”
Emma grabbed a set of fresh clothes from Dan’s drawer unit.
Clark led Dan into the kitchen and stopped at the door to look at Ben, who was still in the living room. “What are you waiting for?” he asked, motioning towards Dan’s room. “It’s your fucking mess.”
Ben stood up and trudged into Dan’s room.
In the kitchen, Clark poured Dan a cold glass of water. “Godfrey doesn’t know anything,” he finally said as he placed it on the table. “Neither does Slater. 100% confirmed.”
“So who took Walker?” Dan asked after a long sip.
“I think he’s still there. He might have fallen or something. And I know we have different ideas about what to do next, but right now we have a bigger problem. If Walker is alive — anywhere — we have to find him before Ben gets him alone and tells him that we know the truth. Because if Richard Walker has a reason to want rid of us, that’s the last problem we’ll ever have.”
Dan thought through the implications of Clark’s words. “So if we do find Walker,” he said, staring at his glass, “and if he is still alive…”
Clark nodded. “I’ll take care of it.”
D plus 36
JSLC Launch Area 4
Dongfeng Aerospace City, China
“The launch failed,” William Godfrey said to a handful of cameras.
The sparsely populated Chinese press room was a far cry from the standing-room-only crowds that Godfrey and other world leaders had addressed over the last few months. None of those addresses, however, had been more important than this one.
“Accidents happen, and we all just saw one. But our project will continue. Is this a setback? Yes. A painful setback? Of course. But no one died. No one was injured. So what we must do now is be thankful for that, learn lessons from this incident, and move forward. Together, we must continue forward.”
Godfrey stood alone at his podium against a backdrop of the GSC logo. President Slater, John Cole, Ding Ziyang and the other attendant leaders were in the next room with Jack Neal and a handful of Chinese security and media liaison staff.
“To the anglophone media in particular, I respectfully stress that now is not the time for unqualified technical analysis of the Límíng module. Continued Chinese participation in the Shield project is essential to its success and the security of our planet, and I urge media outlets to bear that in mind.”
He spoke with no notes and no autocue.
“But the main announcement I’d like to make today is this: DS-1 has been scrapped.”
The reporters in attendance, few though they were, gasped in unison.
“From the beginning, Defensive Station One was hamstrung by the fact that its core module was designed and built before we found the sphere; before we knew what we needed. Every nation involved in the GSC owes a tremendous debt of gratitude to our Chinese friends for providing Límíng unconditionally and without compensation. But while today’s incident was by no measure a blessing in disguise, nor was it a fatal disaster.”
Looks of mild confusion met Godfrey’s words.
“I have witnessed with great sadness the scenes of panic and disorder across the world, and I want to tell those involved this: I understand. I understand your fear and I understand your panic. But I also want to tell them this: you don’t know what I know. You don’t see what I see. You haven’t spent your life at the top of a world of cut-throat international politics, and you haven’t seen how completely everything has changed in the last four months. Some of you might think that unity is nothing but a new buzzword.”
Godfrey paused for several seconds and shook his head.
“But that’s where you’re wrong. Unity is not our new buzzword; unity is our new reality. And when today’s panic subsides, I hope you will reflect on the calm of the last few months. Disclosure brought panic and the plaques brought more, but unity brought peace. The New York agreement — of which DS-1 was the lynchpin — brought peace. To that end, I refute any suggestion that DS-1 was a failure.”
President Slater nodded as Godfrey spoke; not for the cameras — there were none on her — but because she truly agreed.
“Defensive Station One was a stop-gap,” Godfrey continued. “We knew that. We were, as you’ll see if you look back, highly candid about that. Richard Walker’s actions temporarily destroyed the American publics’ faith in their leaders, and President Slater bore the brunt of that. But thanks to China’s generosity, we were able to react immediately with DS-1. To be candid again: DS-1’s real purpose was to serve as proof that we could come together to defend ourselves from an external threat. And come together we did.”
The only British reporter in the room, and the only other person present who Godfrey already knew, finally looked as though he understood what Godfrey was saying. With nothing else to go on beyond his well-honed gut instinct, Godfrey took the reporter’s expression as positive feedback.
“In light of this, I leave you today with the news that our full attention will now turn to Defensive Station Two. Using our combined knowledge and experience, DS-2 will be built from the ground up by the world’s greatest minds and tailor-made to suit our planetary security needs. Shifting our focus to DS-2, rather than trying to work around Límíng’s limitations for DS-1, will actually expedite the meeting of several key goals. The two reasons we pressed ahead with Límíng and DS-1 were finances and urgency. I want to stress that the urgency we felt was just as man-made as the financial pressure. We as leaders had to do something quickly due to the media’s ravenous fearmongering. If we had announced that a new space station would launch in four years, the media would have whipped up hysteria about how that was too long. So what happens now that we don’t have a pre-built module to fall back on? What happens now that we need more than four months? Do we continue to let the sensationalist corporate media shape public views, or do we pull ourselves up by the bootstraps and knuckle down?”
Godfrey let a few silent seconds go by.
“We do what our species has always do
ne: we survive. Today will be hard and tomorrow might be harder, but in another four months we’ll look back and wonder why we ever let this setback get the better of us. I can’t give you firm details on DS-2 right now because I don’t have them, but rest assured that the planning starts now and I will keep you informed of every key development.”
Godfrey stepped to the side of his podium in indication that he was finished.
“Until then,” he said, “I’m trusting you all to be strong and stay safe.”
* * *
William Godfrey walked out of the press room and into a room full of the world’s most powerful politicians. The scene would have looked surreal to any outside observer.
President Slater was the only person to have had much idea of what Godfrey was going to say beyond the promise that work on DS-2 would begin imminently, so he quickly tried to read everyone else’s facial expressions.
“What did you think?” he said, surprising everyone by addressing the question to Jack Neal.
“Firm,” Jack said. “Uneven in places, but firm.”
“It was fine,” President Slater said.
“Hole in one,” John Cole added.
Godfrey ignored Cole’s typically sycophantic comment but took Slater’s approval in the positive spirit it was intended. He then looked directly at Ding Ziyang, who, with respect to everyone else, was his only other truly indispensable ally.
The man, who carried himself with a quiet dignity rarely seen in western politics, said only three words in accentless but broken English: “I speak now.”
“By all means,” Godfrey said.
Ding and three of his security guards walked towards the press room.
“You sure this is a good idea?” Jack whispered.
Godfrey didn’t answer.
D plus 37
Stevenson Farm
Eastview, Colorado
Ben Gold sat in the front passenger seat of the car, reluctant but ready to guide the way to Richard Walker’s plain-sight hiding place. Neither Ben nor Emma had been overly keen on Clark’s idea to go looking for Richard, but he refused to sit at home in front of the TV and wait for events to unfold. “We’ve done enough of that shit,” he’d said.
Immediately before they set off, Emma ran next door to her house and returned with a cardboard pack of latex gloves. Two words — “fake tan” — answered Dan’s question as to why the hell she had so many.
Ben took a pair, keeping his thoughts to himself. He knew that leaving fingerprints would be the least of their problems if someone really had taken Richard, but it struck him as unwise to say so; the gloves wouldn’t do any harm, and there was no sense in causing another argument when it could be avoided.
“This fucking gate,” Clark moaned as the new security gate at the end of their street refused to open. He reversed the car, told everyone to hold on to something, and accelerated straight into the metal barrier. Its already temperamental magnetic locking mechanism buckled without resistance. Clark drove on.
Dan slouched next to Emma in the back seat. As Clark sped past the drive-in, which still bustled with reporters discussing the night’s disaster and William Godfrey’s impassioned call for unity, Dan looked back and caught sight of something outside.
The words on the signpost hit him hard, another brutal punch to the gut: “Welcome to Birchwood, proud home of Dan McCarthy.”
Within minutes, Ben told Clark to take the next left.
“Seriously?” Emma said. “He’s been hiding this close the whole time?”
Ben only nodded.
“And this isn’t the address you gave to Jack Neal, right?”
“No,” Ben said. “I gave him Richard’s decoy address. It’s a cabin in Utah.”
“What if Richard went there?” Dan asked.
Ben shook his head. “Zero chance. He knows I gave the address to Jack.”
No one said anything else until Clark passed comment on the narrow, pitch-black, isolated dirt road Ben insisted would take them to Richard’s house. “This looks like the kind of place people go to get murdered when a horror movie is running out of time,” he said.
“Thanks for that,” Emma sighed.
At the end of the road, a small building came into view. The car’s headlights were the only light source. Clark pulled up beside Richard’s car and killed the engine. “I’ll leave the lights on until we get inside,” he said, turning to see Emma and Dan in the back seat. “You two can stay in the car if you want.”
Emma shook her head. “Lights off and everyone stays together.”
Clark turned off the headlights, plunging the car and everyone inside into a rare kind of total darkness. Emma activated the flashlight on her phone and opened the door.
Outside, she led the way. Clark used his phone to illuminate the area to their left and Dan pointed his towards the field of chin-high corn to the right.
The scene was unshakeably eerie; getting more and more like the movie Clark had mentioned, Dan thought. All that was missing was a rusty swing creaking in the wind.
Emma asked everyone to stand back and knocked firmly on the door. No one answered.
When knocking on every window and screaming at the top of their voices did nothing, Clark was first to lose patience. He picked up a rock and sent it clean through a low window. Other than smash the glass and send Richard’s dog into a hysterical fit of barking, even this provoked no reaction.
“Fuck it,” Clark said. “I’m going in.”
* * *
Clark approached the front door, took five steps back, and used the weight of his shoulder to break through with minimal fuss.
A frightened golden retriever bounded towards the broken door, stopping at Clark and immediately cowering against him.
“Hey, little guy,” Clark said, fumbling for the dog’s collar.
“His name’s Rooster,” Ben said.
Rooster heard Ben’s voice and ran towards him.
Dan watched on, hoping that this was the part when the dog would nudge Ben towards the house and lead him inside to wherever Richard had fallen. Instead, Rooster hid behind Ben and whimpered.
Emma took off her scarf and looped it through the ring in the dog’s collar like a makeshift leash. She handed the scarf to Ben since Rooster was already familiar with him.
“Come on,” Clark said. He led the way. Emma encouraged Dan to hang back with her so they could keep their eyes on Ben. Rooster stuck as close to Ben’s side as he possibly could, his head low.
“Richard?” Ben yelled. “It’s me. Richard?”
The kitchen lay at the end of the old house’s narrow hallway. “Empty,” Clark said.
Emma and Dan, previously at the rear, now led the group back down the hallway to the next door. Emma opened it without knocking. “Nothing,” she relayed. “Empty bathroom.”
“That’s his bedroom,” Ben said, pointing Dan to the next door.
When Dan reached for the doorknob, Rooster began to bark.
“It’s okay, boy,” Ben said. Rooster kept barking.
Dan pushed the door open.
Rooster’s protests reached new heights; the frightened yelps turned to defensive growls. Ben tried to lead him towards the open door, but the dog jerked the makeshift lead out of Ben’s hand and ran head-first into the wall on the other side of the hallway.
“He’s not here,” Dan said as Ben tried to calm the crazed dog. “He’s gone.”
Rooster continued to work himself into more and more of a frenzy. “Close the door,” Ben suggested. Dan did so. The barking stopped.
“Did something happen in there?” Clark asked, crouching down to Rooster’s level as though hoping for a reply. When Rooster did nothing other than cling even more tightly to Ben’s leg, Clark briefly reopened the bedroom door. Right on cue, Rooster worked himself into another frenzy. Clark closed the door and didn’t touch it again.
No one knew what to make of the dog’s terror.
“Are there any cameras?” Emma asked a
fter a few seconds of silence.
“Shit,” Ben said. “Yeah.” He led Emma to a small camera console in the kitchen. It was the same brand as Dan’s, but a much older and cheaper model. Emma quickly saw that it had only four feeds — two outside, two in — and lacked the useful feature which automatically highlighted potential incidents.
“I have to skip through it manually,” she said, using the touchscreen to navigate back to three days earlier and then skipping forward one hour at a time on the feed from the mailbox-cam at the end of the driveway. Richard’s car never moved. “Nothing.”
Emma turned the console upside-down and removed its memory card.
“What are you doing?” Ben asked her.
“I can put this in our console and look for incidents. If anyone has come or gone, even for a minute, we’ll see them. We can’t go through all of this manually; four feeds for three days is nearly three hundred hours of footage.”
“Okay,” Clark said. “We’ll go through it at home.”
“Are we taking anything else?” Dan asked.
Ben looked down at Rooster. “I can’t leave him.”
“Are you sure he’s not microchipped?” Emma said.
Ben nodded. “Richard doesn’t go for stuff like that. Will I take his computer and phone, too?”
Clark and Emma agreed that this was the best option. In case Richard had left of his own accord and the truth was still unknown to anyone else, they wanted to make sure all potentially incriminating evidence was gone. Neither of them wanted to touch any of it; and since Ben didn’t even have their “we were tricked” defence to fall back on if Richard had been found out, they knew he would dispose of the evidence properly.
“Help him load his car,” Clark said to Emma. “Me and Dan will search for notebooks and anything else that might be dangerous.”
Emma agreed and went outside to Ben’s car, which was parked under some trees at the edge of Richard’s property.
Not Alone Page 62