The Final Call

by Craig A. Falconer

  “Mr McCarthy, the—”

  “I’ll talk just as soon as Emma is here and just as soon as these assholes are gone,” Dan interrupted, glaring at the other men who had been party to the aggressive home intrusion that landed him here. “The only thing I’m telling you now is that when you finally do what I say and your bosses find out what I know — and when they find out what my knowledge can prevent — they’re going to hope you’ve been treating me well. And trust me when I tell you that President Slater will have a particular interest in this.”

  “Ms Ford is perfectly safe and unharmed,” Frank insisted. “She’s only a few rooms away and is currently being questioned in a very friendly manner.”

  Dan couldn’t contain a reactive snicker. “Listen, Frank… if that’s even your real name. We can sit here and lie to each other for as long as you want, but I’m saying nothing until Emma is sitting next to me and your goons are gone. And even then, I’m not telling you anything. I’ll talk to President Slater and I’ll talk to Harris, but I’m not talking about this with anyone I don’t know.”

  “That’s not how this works,” Frank said, trying to maintain a non-confrontational and sympathetic tone. “Dan, if I can call you Dan…?”

  Dan threw his hands up in an uncaring shrug.

  “Well, Dan, I don’t have a direct line to President Slater and I’m not sure which Harris you’re referring to.”

  “The Harris who showed me around the research base on Contact Day,” Dan expanded, fairly confident that Frank’s ignorance was an act. “Who else? The Harris I’ve seen every month since then for my medical checks. You know, those invasive government tests I voluntarily undergo every single month?” Dan glared at the younger men in the room — his captors, as he couldn’t help but see them.

  Frank nodded slowly in understanding. “Ah, that Harris. Again, Dan, I wouldn’t know how to reach him even if that was an option. As you can imagine, in his line of work a high degree of secrecy is—”

  “Michael Joseph Harrison,” Dan announced robotically, as though reading from a cue card. “Resident of 1644 Jade Terrace, Santa Fe, along with his wife Susan and their two children, Layla and Owen. Born June 16th 1970, graduated from—”

  “Enough,” Frank boomed, flustered for the first time and returning the interruption with more than a hint of concern creeping through his forceful tone.

  “Is it? So you don’t care that I know where he works? You don’t care that I know he took me to the secret underground base at Heron Lake, the one that no one is supposed to know about? With the greatest respect, Mr Livingston, I can’t tell you too much more without knowing exactly what level of clearance you have, but I can tell you the facility is located at latitude thirty-six point sev—”

  “All of you out,” Frank interrupted once more, even more forcefully than before and this time facing his younger colleagues as he delivered the order. As soon as the room emptied, a look of new-found intensity crossed Frank’s face. He balled his fists and pressed them into the table, staring intently at Dan. “And you. No more games, McCarthy. I tried to be nice about this…”

  Although his heart felt like it was fixing to jump out of his chest, Dan fought to maintain an air of detached composure. He drew upon memories of the hostile crowds and questioners he had faced in the past, from Marco Magnifico to Joe Crabbe, and remembered all the times Emma had impressed upon him the importance of conveying strength even if strong was the last thing he felt.

  Affecting nonchalance, Dan pushed his chair backwards, crossed his arms, and placed his feet on the table.

  “Who the fuck do you think you are?” Frank yelled.

  Dan uncrossed his arms then put his right hand behind his back and into the waistband of his underwear, delicately unclipping something. The item he produced look like a tiny piece of individually wrapped candy. He wasted no time in unwrapping it to reveal a blue capsule.

  “I’m the guy who the Messengers just warned about what the GeoSovs are going to do tomorrow,” he said, holding the capsule an inch from his lips and keeping his shaky voice as assertive as he could. “And if you don’t bring me my fiancée right now, there’s going to be nothing anyone can do to stop it. This isn’t a negotiation, Frank. You give me what I want or I give you nothing — that’s what this is. But tell me… how much blood can those hands of yours take?”

  Frank stood up straight and narrowed his eyes, as though studying Dan for telltale signs of a bluff. There were none. “Take that away from your mouth,” Frank said. “I’ll bring her in.”

  Dan lowered his legs from the table but kept the capsule right beside his mouth, actually moving it slightly closer to emphasise the point that he wasn’t going to cooperate until Emma was safely at his side. He glanced at his watch. “The clock’s ticking…”

  Without another word, Frank left the room. He didn’t slam the door or look back in anger, but his frustration was evident.

  Alone in the office, Dan placed the small blue capsule into his pocket for safe keeping.

  Rather than cyanide, as Frank had apparently and understandably assumed, the capsule in fact contained a tiny state-of-the-art tracking device; and if Dan ever had cause to bite into it, an emergency notification would reach his brother Clark’s phone to reveal his exact location.

  There was a spare still attached to his waistband, just in case one was ever unclipped by accident, and thinking about this led him to remove the first from his pocket and gaze at it more pensively than ever.

  Despite Frank’s claim that they were at ‘Caserma Florenzi’, Dan couldn’t truly be sure where he was and he certainly couldn’t be sure what was going to happen next.

  Hearing footsteps approaching the door — it was impossible to tell whether there were two feet or four — Dan placed the capsule between his molars and crunched. He immediately spat it out and saw that it had opened successfully, exposing the tiny and now-activated tracker.

  He put the tracker back in his pocket and sat up straight, as ready as he’d ever be for whatever was coming next.

  V minus 92

  Air Force One

  200 miles southeast of La Paz, Bolivia

  “Against their will?” President Slater barked incredulously into her phone, which had been handed to her at 40,000 feet by a trusted aide as she made her way to Buenos Aires. “I don’t care how you know he was contacted! I care that you took them, using force, and now you’re wasting time asking my permission to reunite them! Of course reunite them, you stupid…”

  Slater trailed off, leaning forward and pinching the bridge of her nose between her thumb and forefinger. It was proving difficult to stop her mind from jumping into worst-case scenarios of what could happen next when the world found out that federal agents were treating Dan McCarthy and Emma Ford like criminals, but that was just one of many problems raised by the news she’d just received.

  If Dan really had been contacted again, particularly on the eve of worldwide Contact Day anniversary celebrations and the GCC’s inauguration gala, the list of the kinds of disruptive and destabilising events that might follow was almost endless.

  Much, of course, depended on the nature of the message he had received; if his insinuation that its content was related to an imminent GeoSov attack turned out to be true, she very much wanted to hear all about it.

  There was however no doubt in Slater’s mind that Dan would have shared it voluntarily — despite their differences in the past, he had never been one to act out of spite — and that only made things more frustrating.

  The reckless actions of the agents who seized Dan and Emma angered her immensely, since this was one issue that could have been easily avoided. And without knowing exactly what the supposedly GeoSov-related message pertained to, she quietly hoped that it would prove easy to deal with, too.

  In a matter of hours she would be on the ground with William Godfrey, and the scope of their discussions was clearly no longer going to be limited to the topic of how to best navigate the gro
wing war of words between Buenos Aires and Beijing.

  Every little development that painted the United States in a bad light gave ELF nations another stick with which to beat the GCC, but a development like this was unprecedented. If news got out that the Messengers had reached out to Dan McCarthy and that American agents had violently seized him before he could tell another soul, the time for words would be gone. As President Slater knew only too well, the time for protests and quite likely riots would be upon her… and that was without even thinking about the reputational damage such a story would deal to the GCC and all of the geopolitical ramifications that came with that.

  “I don’t need you making my life any more difficult than it already is,” Slater said, “so just give Dan exactly what he wants, record exactly what he tells you, and give me a report immediately. Emma isn’t stupid and we know they don’t want any public attention; this situation doesn’t have to get any worse, and it doesn’t have to get out. And before you question the two of them together, bring some Italian personnel into the room. I don’t want this mess being all about us, understood?”

  The man on the other end of the line, Frank Something-or-other, confirmed his understanding and launched into a bumbling apology for the way things had been handled so far, but Slater hung up midway through it.

  Why tonight?, she lamented internally. Of all the goddamn nights… why did it have to be this one?

  V minus 91

  Caserma Florenzi

  Milan, Italy

  Emma ran into Dan’s arms as soon as the door swung open, giving him no time to meet her halfway or do anything except smile at the confirmation that she was okay.

  “Is it true?” she asked him, running a gentle finger over the back of his neck. “They’re back?”

  “Close enough to send me a message,” he said. “It was the dream kind, like when I saw the triangle that led back to Lolo.”

  Emma turned towards Frank, the only stranger present other than a junior-looking Italian officer of some kind who looked greatly out of his depth. Immediately, Frank closed the door.

  “You’re going to ask how we knew,” he began, “so I’ll save everyone a few minutes and tell you that a small device was implanted in Dan’s neck during one of his monthly tests back home. It was designed to alert us to any unusual sensations of pain… in other words, it was designed to immediately alert us to any contact events.”

  “You put something inside me?” Dan asked, enraged at the violation.

  Frank nodded curtly. “And it worked.”

  “But when I woke up, your goons were there,” Dan went on. “Instantly. Have there been agents hiding outside my house every night, all this time, in case the Messengers contacted me again?”

  Emma was shaking her head, disgusted at the thought of how closely they had evidently been surveilled.

  “We’ve been monitoring you for your own good!” Frank replied, raising his voice. “Dan, like it or not, your safety is a national security priority. We can’t allow you to fall into the wrong hands, and we can’t allow you to do anything that might lead you into trouble. Sleepwalking, venturing into cornfields in the middle of the night… as our established point of contact, your wellbeing is extremely important to us.”

  “And who exactly is ‘us’?” Dan blasted. “The US? The GCC? Because something tells me your bosses won’t be calling Ding anytime soon to tell him the Messengers are back. Something tells me that my interests aren’t really what you care about here. You know, there’s a reason the Messengers go through me: because they don’t trust any of you! And why would they? I don’t trust any of you Men In Black wannabes, and we’re not just the same species and the same nationality — my taxes pay your damn salaries!”

  Frank shrugged. “What do you want me to tell you? That the content of your communications with the Messengers, one-way or two-way, isn’t an important national security issue? We’re all adults here, Dan, so let’s be real about this.”

  “So what about me?” Emma asked. “Do I have one of these pain-tracking chips in my neck? Let’s be real about that.”

  “You do,” the man admitted.

  Emma looked squarely at Dan. “Tell him nothing. Until these microchip implants are out, tell him nothing.”

  “Does Harris know about the implants?” Dan asked, surprising even himself by caring.

  “No,” Frank said. “As your personal liaison, he knew no more than necessary about anything. But speaking of Harris, how did you know so much about him? He can’t have told you any of it, and I’m sure you understand the security implic—”

  “Stop changing the subject,” Dan interrupted. The real answer was relatively mundane — he had covertly placed a tracking chip on the collar of Harris’s blazer during one of their monthly meetings in Colorado, and before long it very straightforwardly showed Dan the location of the man’s suburban home and top-secret workplace. There was a hint of hypocrisy in the fact that Dan had tracked Harris’s movements but would have felt betrayed if Harris had been party to the reverse process, but no one could deny that attaching a basic tracker to a piece of clothing was a world away from medically inserting a pain-measuring device beneath an unknowing target’s skin.

  And mundane or not, Dan wasn’t giving Frank any answers.

  “Bring me a phone so I can call Timo and find a doctor he trusts to get these things out of our necks,” Emma said. “Because we’re serious: until they’re out, Dan’s telling you nothing.”

  Dan gulped and pulled her in close, whispering as quietly as he could that the message was very time-sensitive and had to reach President Slater as soon as possible.

  “Forget Timo for now,” Emma decided, aiming the words at Frank. “Get Slater on the line. Dan will talk to her.”

  After five minutes that felt like fifty, Frank returned once more with a phone in his hand. Dan had told Emma nothing in the interim, understanding that sharing the content of his dream would have risked making her a target for some potentially questionable interrogation methods.

  Dan looked at Emma as Frank held the phone out, as though asking if she would mind doing the first of the talking.

  She took the phone. “Hello?”

  “Ah, Emma,” President Slater said, slightly surprised. The two weren’t on the friendliest of terms given everything that had happened in the last few years, including a few tense stand-offs and a fruitless midnight raid on Dan’s home that still had Slater in his family’s bad books, but Emma could see why ‘Ms Ford’ might have felt overly formal.

  “First of all,” Slater continued, “let me apologise for what you’ve been put through. The first I heard about any of this was when I received a call asking if Dan’s request to have you by his side could be granted. I didn’t authorise any of this.”

  “Did you authorise the chips they put in our necks?” Emma asked. “Or the twenty-four-hour surveillance we’ve been under for the past year?”

  “I do know that you’ve been under close surveillance, but at no point did I sign off on sub-dermal implants to track your pain levels. I learned of those implants during the phone call I just mentioned, when I asked how the agents could be absolutely sure Dan really had received a message. But Emma, you know better than anyone that I don’t make every decision at every level. I apologise again for how this has been handled, but as for what we can control right now, I gather Dan wants to tell me something?”

  “He does,” Emma said, taking the apology for what it was worth but seeing no need to acknowledge it. “But would you mind telling Frank and his friend to give us the room?”

  Frank scoffed at the notion and shook his head in disbelief. But when Emma handed him the phone, his expression quickly confirmed that the unwanted order had indeed come. He didn’t argue, clearly and understandably less used to dealing directly with the President of the United States than Emma had become in recent years. He left the phone on the desk and sulked out of the room with the bewildered Italian officer he’d brought along to e
nsure some form of international presence as per Slater’s earlier order.

  Dan looked at the phone for a few seconds before picking it up, then wasted no more time in getting to the point. “I would have told you this right away if those guys hadn’t taken me like they did,” he began, “because this is the most urgent message I’ve ever gotten.”

  Emma stood anxiously beside Dan, currently as unaware as Slater of what he was going to say next.

  “Are you in Buenos Aires yet?” he asked.

  “Almost,” Slater replied. “Why?”

  “Will you be staying at the Gravesen?”

  “No…”

  Dan hesitated, more than a little surprised by this. “Uh, well, are you scheduled to be there tomorrow morning at eleven?”

  “How do you know that?” Slater asked, an automatic question to which she already knew the answer.

  “And you’re supposed to be meeting with the Japanese Prime Minister, right?”

  The sound of President Slater gulping came through the phone. No verbal reply was needed.

  “Listen to me,” Dan implored. “If you go to that meeting, you’ll be taken hostage by the GeoSovs. I don’t know how in the hell they’re going to pull it off, but they are. And they’ll unfurl a huge flag from a window on the top floor, on the right as you look up from outside. That’s all I know. It came to me in a dream — or I should say the Messengers showed it to me in a dream — and when I tried to run into the hotel, the pain got so strong that it woke me up and knocked me out of bed. Before I could make sense of anything, your goons grabbed hold of me and—”

  “They’re not my goons,” Slater said, her voice far hollower than usual. “But Dan… thank you for sharing this. I’ll see to it that your implants are removed whenever is convenient for you. We both know that you can’t go back to leading a normal life, but please don’t be under any illusions that I think things have been handled acceptably so far. I’ll also let you know what our security services find during the full sweep of the Gravesen that I’m about to order. Would you like us to arrange a flight, or do you want to stay for the rest of your week in Italy?”