New Title 2

by S J MacDonald

That was quite simply because the why had turned out to be because he wanted to be important, and had decided that the best way to achieve that would be to kill someone famous. He’d been fantasising about it for years, making plans to kill this person or that, seeing himself as a dark and powerful man, the hunter in the shadows. Alex von Strada’s arrival had presented him with a target which had roused him from fantasy into action. There was, without a doubt, intense jealousy there. Oddly, one of the things he resented most about Alex was how short he was. Kelvan himself was rather shorter than the average for a Telethoran and had always felt that people were patronising him because of it. And there was von Strada, no bigger than a kid, being treated like a hero. There was a lot more to it than that of course, and once he started talking about all the reasons he thought von Strada deserved to be shot he was at it for hours. But at the root of it all was a man who felt he had been cheated of the life and success he deserved, who blamed everyone but himself for his failure, and who believed that if he killed someone famous then he himself would acquire all their fame and then some, spending the rest of his life as a celebrity. Of course he’d be spending some of that life in prison, but that, he said, would give him time to work on his autobiography and consider offers for the movie rights.

  He was said to be disappointed and angry, though, that his bullets hadn’t killed either von Strada or his girlfriend. He was inclined to the opinion that it was all of a piece with all the other ways that people had cheated him of his rights. He wished now, he declared bitterly, that he’d shot one of the other people on his target list. Top of that list were a college lecturer he blamed for his having dropped out of his course to qualify as a technician, and the boss of one of the firms which had fired him when they’d found the qualifications listed on his CV didn’t exist.

  Alex, when he was told that by his new chief bodyguard, was quiet for a while, considering.

  ‘I’m glad it was me, then,’ he said, and actually looked pleased. ‘They,’ he pointed out, as Lt Vila looked surprised, ‘would not have been wearing shielding.’

  It was some comfort to him that by becoming the target himself that had probably saved the life of one of the others. Had he been given that as a choice, after all, he would have stepped into the line of fire without hesitation. He did not hate his attacker, either – would have said, and believed, that he wasn’t wasting any emotional energy on him whatsoever.

  All the same, he would have had to admit to just a little twinge of gratification when he was told what had happened to Othoro Kelvan on his arrival in prison. He was on remand, having been found sane and fit to stand trial. He clearly had delusional traits, however, as he seriously expected the other prisoners to greet him as if he was a king amongst them. Upon arriving in the social area he stood with his hands out by his sides like a performer taking a bow, and announced himself proudly to be ‘The man who shot von Strada.’ Upon which a fellow prisoner punched him hard on the nose and retorted, ‘And I’m the man who thumped you.’.

  That day, though, Alex was far more interested in the fate of a very different young man.

  Janil Caldova had come briefly onto their radar in the second week of their visit. He was the young man who’d spotted Silvie swimming in the Amber Sea. He was, it had been reported, an amateur holographer who’d been filming at the reef using an underwater drone. Seeing that Silvie had come within range of his camera, security had acted quickly to secure that footage, deleting it from his camera beyond any chance of retrieval. They’d left it at that, secure in the knowledge that nobody would believe him when he told them what had happened.

  Nor had they. Even the Alien Truth fraternity had not felt it to be credible when he told them that he had been at the reef ‘spotting’ for alien sightings, that he had seen a silver haired, beautiful girl swimming under water without a diving suit or any kind of breathing apparatus, obviously breathing the water and swimming with the fish dancing around her like something magical. Only then, he said, people in black-masked diving suits had swarmed out of the water onto his boat, recalled his camera and deleted the footage. They had checked his ID and asked him what he was doing there, but had not answered any of his own questions. Then, just as they were dropping back off the boat and vanishing back into the depths, one of them had told him, sounding amused, ‘I wouldn’t tell people, unless you want them to think you’re a nutter.’

  And that, of course, was exactly what had happened. One member of Alien Truth had commented caustically that they didn’t want to hear stories about mermaids, thanks. Another had said that if Janil wanted to be taken seriously he should at least produce a sighting which wasn’t so obviously lifted from the plot of a holovision series. And anyway, as thousands of them had pointed out, they were busy right now following the real story, that of the Solaran visit.

  The Diplomatic Corps was doing an excellent job with that. All alien-spotters worthy of the name knew that Solaran visits to your world could be identified by the sequential closure of prestigious art galleries and museums on various excuses. They would be closed to the public for a few hours or a day on pretexts such as technical problems, a need to deep-clean or work being done on the exhibits. None of the closures would be noteworthy in itself, but if you put them together they would form a kind of itinerary for a visit by people interested in art and history. There were rumours, too, of a van that had been seen arriving or departing from those venues, a van with catering or other ID which, if you checked it, would turn out to be fake.

  The Diplomatic Corps were, therefore, masking the real exo-visit by generating the appearance of Solarans staying at their embassy and visiting just the kinds of places they would want to, had they actually been here. The mystery van had been spotted several times, and the members of Alien Truth, like the media, were absolutely convinced by the charade.

  Janil Caldova, however, had not been. And finding that his story was universally derided, he had resorted to publishing his rationale, explaining how he had worked out that there were quarians on the planet and what had led him to select that particular reef in the Amber Sea as his spotting point.

  It was an extremely intelligent, well observed and tightly analysed sequence of facts and probabilities, worked out by a man who was in fact a third year student in applied mathematics. He wasn’t a genius but he was very clever, and more than that, determined. He was fascinated with aliens and had spent many long nights calculating probability scenarios in the hope of spotting it when they did come to Telathor. And the scanning programme he had written himself had picked up three tiny public announcements from datanet, highlighting them as a sequence he’d predicted in one of his ‘what if’ probability curves – the one in which he’d worked out what was likely to happen if quarians ever came to his world.

  Even he knew that was highly unlikely to happen. Few people amongst the general population even knew that quarians were real – for most, it was no more than the story of a hoax perpetrated decades before, quickly exposed as such. Alien Truth and other groups like them knew better, and were surprisingly well informed, too, on the reason why quarians were not visiting their worlds. It was a probability he had only worked out as the faintest of remote hopes.

  But there it was. An underwater hotel closed at short notice. Eight leisure submarines taken out of service by several different companies around the planet. A major underwater tourist venue closed to the public for a period of several hours.

  Further closures and clues had followed, and Janil had calculated every one of them, predicting that that particular reef zone in the Amber Sea would be on the visit list within the next week to ten days. So he’d taken himself off there, hired a boat with a drone camera and spent nine days filming fish and swallowing seasickness remedies.

  And he had been right. And he’d got footage. And now nobody would believe him.

  Publishing his rationale, though, had got results beyond his wildest expectations. Alien Truth had given it a big fat raspberry, with a typical comment
of, ‘If you’re trying to distract us from what we know is REALLY going on here, who are you working for?’ Even his friends at uni had been embarrassed when he’d tried to talk them through his calculations. One of his best mates had put a hand on his arm and told him that it was easy to get carried away when you were really into something, but he ought to be careful – people were saying, he told him, that he’d become obsessed, even that he’d lost it.

  And if none of them believed his story, they certainly would not have believed what happened next.

  Fifteen

  Janil was picked up by security services – not, as he’d imagined he might be if he ever exposed a Big Truth, snatched into a van and taken off to be interrogated in some futuristic secret base. Instead, he was contacted by a friendly woman who said she worked for a head-hunter employment agency and that they believed he met the needs of one of their clients looking to employ at junior executive level.

  He went along to the meeting, only to be told that his potential employer was a security agency. They had, the woman told him, been very impressed by his research and data analysis skills and would like to know if he’d considered a career in the intelligence services.

  He’d told her, ‘No thanks.’ and left the office in a state of dazed amazement, only to be called minutes later by a man who introduced himself as a personnel officer at the League Embassy.

  ‘You’ve come to our notice through an analysis you published recently,’ said the urbane man. ‘A flawed presumption, of course, but nevertheless an excellent demonstration of your skills. So I wondered, perhaps, if you might like to call in and discuss employment possibilities with the Diplomatic Service.’

  ‘Look,’ said Janil, ‘I already said no, and I mean no, I don’t want to be any part of the Establishment, thank you!’

  ‘Er…’ the man looked confused. ‘Sorry, Mr Caldova, but whoever else might have made you an offer of employment, I assure you that it wasn’t us. This is our first approach.’ He was glancing at a screen off-camera as he spoke, and his expression cleared. ‘Ah, yes, I see. No, that was another agency, Mr Caldova. And while I fully respect your position with regard to ‘the Establishment’,’ a little twinkle with that, as of an adult tolerantly amused at the naïve views of a child, ‘I assure you that the Diplomatic Service has a great deal to offer which I do believe you would find extremely rewarding. So would you at least consider coming in for an informal meeting to discuss possibilities?’

  Janil said no, which was accepted, with some regret and the offer being left open with a number to call should he change his mind.

  He’d had three more contacts before the end of that day; two more calls and an encounter with a man and woman who turned up at his student bedsit and told him that they were with military intelligence.

  Janil was sick of it by then and told them so in no uncertain terms.

  ‘I don’t know who you people are or why you think it’s so funny to be winding me up like this, but I’ve absolutely had it – if you bug me again,’ he glared, ‘I will call the cops on you. No, don’t show me your ID again; I don’t want to see it! I could get better ID than that from any joke shop. Just clear off before I call the cops!’

  And with that he shut the door in their faces.

  At about three in the morning, though, he had a visit from people who did not take no for an answer.

  ‘Janil Caldova, we are detaining you for questioning under the Global Security Act.’

  He had imagined such a situation, many times. In his imagination it had been sinister guys in suits and shades and he, naturally, had behaved heroically, defied them, even broken away and gone on the run, movie-style.

  These, though, were Telethoran police. Just normal police in their shorts and tees, speaking to him with the courtesy for which they were known. So Janil, being a well brought up young man, got dressed and went with them, bewildered and scared but compliant.

  He was even more bewildered when they took him to an unmarked car and steered him into the back, with salutes and ‘sir’ for the man inside who thanked them in obvious dismissal.

  Janil found himself sitting next to a ‘sinister guy in a suit’. Except that he wasn’t really that sinister, being middle aged and plump with bags under his eyes and a very friendly smile.

  ‘Sorry about that,’ were his first words, and it was obvious that he really was concerned about the fright that Janil had been given. ‘Relax; you’re not really under arrest.’

  Janil looked at the car door. It had been shut by the police as he got in, and they were still standing outside it. And even as he looked, the car lifted off smoothly and drove up into sky lanes. Under arrest or not, it was clear, he was going where they wanted to take him.

  ‘My name is Tamus,’ his abductor informed him pleasantly. ‘I’m an assistant to one of President Arthas’s aides – please relax, you are not in any trouble and nobody will do you any harm. We just need to have a little chat and do some paperwork.’

  He spoke as if having the police grab people out of bed and hustle them into unmarked cars at three in the morning was absolutely the normal way to do routine paperwork. Janil stared at him.

  ‘Where are we going?’ he asked.

  ‘Nowhere, yet.’ Tamus said. ‘We’re just driving around while we have a chat. If you then decide you don’t want to take things further we will take you back home, no trouble. But no,’ he added regretfully, as a mutinous look began arising on the young man’s face, ‘we can’t take you back there just yet as there are, I’m afraid, some formalities we have to go through – sorry about that. But please just bear with us, it won’t take long and I do believe you will want to hear what I have to say.’

  Janil folded his arms and glared.

  ‘Firstly,’ said Tamus ‘allow me to apologise for the various approaches you’ve had to deal with today, though that really isn’t our fault, nothing to do with us, really, I do feel somebody should apologise for it. You see, what happened was that the LIA talent-scouted you on the basis of your really excellent predictive analysis. And they, as it were, put ‘dibs’ on you, telling the other agencies that they had first claim in making a recruitment approach. Several other agencies then slapped their own dibs in which, under the etiquette of these matters, meant they had to take turns in approaching you. I’m afraid that there is a rather juvenile element within the intelligence service and for reasons I will not attempt to fathom your recruitment has become the subject of an inter-agency contest. There is, I understand, the prize of a crate of doughnuts at stake for the first agency which can get you to come in for an interview. Ludicrous, I know, and I’m sure very annoying.’ A helpless little gesture and smile. ‘Sorry about that.’

  ‘Oh.’ Janil was bewildered, then. ‘So this is your turn then, is it?’

  Tamus looked at him in a way that made Janil feel about five years old.

  ‘We do not,’ he said, with a crisp edge to his voice, ‘play games like that with our citizens, Mr Caldova. I, as I said, am an assistant to one of President Arthas’s aides. My job is to issue you with paperwork under the Security of the League Act. I know that sounds rather intimidating,’ a quick smile and the phrase which he seemed to use almost like punctuation, rather as other people might say ‘um’. ‘Sorry about that. But it is, I assure you, not nearly as draconian as it sounds.’ Another quick smile and Janil found himself feeling reassured, even though he knew that he was in an extremely vulnerable situation here and had no reason at all to trust this man. Excitement was rising in him with a dawning realisation.

  ‘I was right,’ he said. ‘There are quarians here!’

  He spoke with some triumph, which evidently surprised Tamus.

  ‘You had doubts?’

  ‘No,’ Janil said, then admitted, ‘I was starting to doubt my own sanity, though, by the end, wondering if my mates were right and I’d hallucinated the whole thing, OD’ing on Travcalm. But it did happen, and this…’ he gestured at the car, ‘is because I exposed it, ri
ght?’ Then a terrible suspicion dawned. ‘This is for real?’ he queried. ‘You’re not some guy my mates have got to do it as a wind up?’

  ‘Please,’ said Tamus, with a hint of weariness, ‘do try to dial down the paranoia, Mr Caldova. That way really does madness lie. I am, I assure you, on the presidential staff. If you really do insist on it we can head over to the Arbour and you can meet my boss. But here is my ID, and please, take a moment to check me on datanet.’

  Janil did just that, and discovered that he was talking to Tamusan Gilder, a senior member of General Torbus’s staff. General Torbus was the presidential advisor on matters of security. There were enough pictures on datanet of Tamus in company with both the general and the president for Janil to be convinced that he really was who he said he was. This was way beyond any probability that it had been something set up by his mates.

  ‘All right,’ he said, and looked back at the man who represented the Establishment, with all that that implied. ‘I suppose you’re going to slap a gagging order on me.’

  ‘Well – impose a publication ban,’ Tamus amended. ‘We will not attempt to stop you talking about this, Mr Caldova – such bans never work and are contrary to policy anyway. So you are, and remain, at liberty to tell anyone you wish about your experiences, including the media. I think it only fair to tell you, though, that the media will not broadcast your story, as they are subject to restrictions themselves. As far as you are concerned, the only restriction we are imposing is that you do not publish, broadcast or in any other way circulate the contents of your analysis. It is, I’m afraid, just too good. And given your determination, we feel sure that you will succeed in bringing it to the attention of people who recognise its mathematical rigour and take it seriously. And that would mean us having to run intervention with them, then, so we do have to stop it right here.’ A little smile and the inevitable, ‘Sorry about that.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Janil, not sure whether to feel complimented or indignant.