“That’s all true,” Emma said, unsure where Timo was going, “but others have been looking into telepathy, too. I don’t know if you know this part, Timo, but there have been multiple attempted data thefts from the facilities where Dan’s been tested and studied. People don’t talk about this in public because it sounds crazy, but there’s a lot of scientific interest in the specifics of how the Messengers were able to communicate telepathically with each other. There are a few discussions online about whether or not their physical connection to Dan might have affected his physiology, and the idea that the Messengers could have transferred their telepathic abilities to Dan has been raised. Fortunately it’s a real fringe belief, but it is out there.”
“I did know that,” Timo said, “and it’s exactly what I’m worried about. Anything that backs up those theories will be seized upon, because it’s a huge story. It’s the kind of theory that people don’t have to believe to be interested in, because it’s just so big.”
“Well, I didn’t know about any of that,” Dan said.
Emma shrugged. “I figured at least one of us had to keep an eye on that kind of stuff, but I also figured that one of us was enough.”
“Definitely,” he replied.
“So I also had an idea of what we could do,” Tara interjected, speaking to Timo but glancing between the others as if to remind them she was there. “We know it’s not going to work with Chinese, but I think maybe Dan should meet John Cole to find out how much he really knows about the triangles. Godfrey too, in case there’s something he’s keeping even from you. And then, if they’ll agree to it, a GeoSov like Poppy from last night’s Focus 20/20. Then we’d know what they know. One way or another, we’d know.”
“I love it,” Timo boomed, his voice suddenly almost as loud as the clapping of his hands that punctuated his declaration. “This could change everything. Knowing who’s lying and where the triangles really came from would enable us to dampen all of these tensions that have been… damnit, the time!”
As the others exchanged confused looks, Timo pulled his phone from his pocket.
“Godfrey is addressing the press and the speech is due to start any second now,” Timo said, staring at the time on his phone and sighing when he saw that it was consistent with the decorative hands-only clock on Emma’s wall. “I can maybe still stop him. But Dan, if we tell him to call it off, there’s no going back. Are you sure about this?”
“Call him,” Dan affirmed. “And quickly, because whatever he’s going to say about the second triangle and about what Cole said last night will probably make things worse!”
“I’ll try Slater at the same time,” Emma chimed in.
Clark, meanwhile, set off to get the TV remote.
The change in Timo’s body language that came immediately after he made the call told Dan all he had to know. “Straight to voicemail,” he reported, underlining his visual disappointment.
“Slater’s, too,” Emma added with a quick shake of her head.
In the living room, Clark had known before any of them. “It’s too late,” he called through to the kitchen. “He’s already talking.”
V minus 54
GCC Headquarters
Buenos Aires, Argentina
“I’ll be brief,” Chairman Godfrey began, addressing his packed-out media room. “As I’m sure you can all understand, I would rather not have to say any of this at all. But the words and even more pertinently the actions of our enemies can no longer be allowed to go unchallenged.”
Kyle Young, present alongside his ACN cameraman in the hope that Godfrey might take questions at the end, was as shocked as anyone by the GCC Chairman’s casual utterance of the word ‘enemies’, a hitherto unspoken term in reference to the ELF. The question on the tip of his tongue was a request to expand on that word, but he knew Godfrey well enough to know there was a lot more to come; if he was starting out this strong, he was going deep.
“It’s time to start calling a spade a spade. If the ELF name wasn’t so ingrained I’d be tempted to start calling the Earth Liaison Forum what it really is: Contact International, or Conintern, if you will. It doesn’t take a cartographer to look at a map and see that the countries affiliated to the ELF look decidedly like those who found themselves humbled by defeat at the end of the Cold War, and those of you fortunate enough to have been born after our hard-earned victory over their poisonous ideology can simply type Comintern — that’s Com with an ‘m’ — into your phones to see what I’m talking about. While you’re at it, have a look at Holodomor and Tiananmen Square to acquaint yourself with who we’re dealing with.
“On that point, you’ll know by now that I consider Dan McCarthy a friend. Dan, however, is a shining example of a well-meaning individual who is simply too young to remember the Chinese and Russian aggression of the past. Perhaps the fact that their recent aggression has so often fallen upon their own people is why the rest of the world has turned a blind eye? Of that, we can only speculate. What goes beyond the realm of speculation and crosses into objective reality is the recent international aggression we’ve seen and heard from the ELF’s leaders. No doubt there will be those who decry my mention of certain things as provocative and internationally irresponsible. To those I say this: the pathetic words of John Cole and the desperate actions of the unelected dictator Ding Ziyang go far beyond provocative and internationally irresponsible. Whether these triangles are a power-grabbing hoax or whether two truly alien artefacts are currently being deliberately hidden away from the neutral eyes of GCC scientists, I am no longer willing to stand idly by while the illiberal enemies of freedom play politics with our planet’s future.
“The discovery sites in Zanzibar and Vanuatu seem too conveniently located to dismiss as mere coincidence, even without factoring in the exquisitely convenient timing of the triangles’ discoveries. But ladies and gentlemen, citizens of the world, I live and lead with an open mind. Stranger things have happened; after all, aliens have walked among us. I rule nothing out. I stand before you not to speculate, for the next few days will reveal the truth behind these triangles and I am not too proud to say I can’t be sure which way that’s going to go.
“What I can’t help but be sure of, however, is that there are some striking parallels between recent events and a certain ‘leak’ with which we’re all intimately familiar. I mentioned Dan being too young to have an intrinsic understanding of how to read between the lines that come out of Beijing’s spin machine, but what Dan knows more than anyone is why the late Richard Walker initiated the infamous IDA leak when he did. The answer, of course, was Chinese aggression.
“The very week of the IDA leak, they had just announced plans for a permanent lunar colony and a manned mission to Mars. That detail has faded from our recent memory, but in years to come Richard Walker will be considered a hero for stopping those things from happening. That was Walker’s ‘emergency stop’ to halt China’s nationalistic space ambitions, and it doesn’t take a genius to see that these triangles came at a very handy time to halt our progress here at the GCC. But in any case, at this point I’m afraid I must move on from Walker and speak briefly of the cretinous and increasingly obese John Cole.”
Kyle Young stifled a surprised laugh at Godfrey’s very sudden and out-of-place personal comment on Cole’s size. Godfrey noticed this — Kyle had a prime spot near the front — and it brought a momentary smile to his own lips.
“In John Cole we have a man who was hounded out of British politics and who resorted to working with a list of corrupt leaders that wouldn’t look out of place as a list of defendants at the International Criminal Court. I heard what he said about me yesterday and I was entirely unsurprised. Of course he’s bitter that I twice left British politics with the best wishes of my party and my people when I’d been invited to represent the collective interests of our planet’s greatest nations. If I was John Cole, I would be bitter too! This is a man abandoned by even Jack Neal, lest we forget. But let me tell you this: none of
Cole’s understandable bitterness comes close to excusing his traitorous allegiance with the man he sycophantically calls President Ding.”
Although sporadic tittering had filled the room while Godfrey laid into Cole, the din faded immediately as his attention turned to Ding.
“I would laugh, if it wasn’t so tragic,” Godfrey sighed. “My good friend President Slater may not be everyone’s cup of tea, but she was openly elected by an educated populace who can just as openly vote her out next time round if that’s what they want to do. Tell me, who elected Ding Ziyang? If you said no one, you’d be close. His politburo or commissars or whatever they want to call themselves may have chosen him over some other individuals, but the tragic fact remains that the great people of China live under an illiberal dictatorship and have no say in who represents them on the world stage. And that, good people of the media, is why at every opportunity I seek to clarify that our problem is not with the billion-plus industrious and hardworking citizens of Earth who call that country home. Our problem, and it’s a big one, lies with the Communist Party which is currently holding those citizens hostage.
“Other leaders tend to bite their tongues out of respect for the tradition of refraining from commenting on other nations’ internal affairs, so I’ll say this for them: the greatest single threat to global peace — yesterday, today and tomorrow — is the Chinese Communist Party.”
From his spot in the front row, Kyle gulped at these words. The laughter was gone; things had taken a turn few had expected, and Godfrey had gone into a gear none had seen coming.
“A recent vote among our delegates has granted me executive authority to comment substantively as and when contact-related developments require an immediate response,” the GCC Chairman said, straightening the edges of his notes by tapping them on the table as he often did to signify the end of a speech, “so please feel free to make yourselves at home here in the media room. For now, I’ll close by sharing my dream of peace.
“My hope is that some good comes from our current turbulent times, and my dearest hope is that the fallout from this turbulence hastens the collapse of Dictator Ding’s illegitimate rule. This is not a war and China is not our enemy. My dream is therefore not a dream of Chinese defeat, and to my many friends in China I say this: my personal dream, for your sake, is the dream of democracy. My dream is the dream of a democratic revolution. My dream, dear friends, is the dream of regime change.”
V minus 53
Ford Residence
Birchwood, Colorado
“Regime change?” Timo sighed, shaking his head at the screen. “What the hell is he doing talking like that? And this isn’t Iraq, Libya, Venezuela, hand me an atlas and I’ll name you a dozen more… this is China.”
“Exactly,” Emma said. “It’s not a threat, it’s a deflection. He’s trying to embarrass and isolate Ding with the Cold War and communist dictator stuff, and he’s trying to put him on the defensive with that regime change comment. You know I don’t like Godfrey, but he almost always knows what he’s doing. It would be different if Slater had said those words, but Godfrey isn’t a head of government and doesn’t command a military or anything like that. They’re just words. Stupid words, but just words.”
“But Slater must have signed off on everything he just said,” Timo replied, still dumbfounded.
Emma shrugged. “Look at all the things Cole said about Godfrey and about America last night… Ding must have signed off on all that.”
“I’m still willing to go through with these meetings if you think it’s viable,” Dan told her, cutting in before Timo could continue the same kind of analysis that the now-muted ACN newscasters were conducting on TV.
Emma thought quietly for at least ten seconds, commanding everyone else’s rapt attention as she did. Although a lot had changed in Birchwood and it would have been a stretch to say that anyone was on top of things, Emma’s gut instincts were still the group’s trusted compass in times of difficulty or indecision.
“Definitely viable,” she eventually said, a lot more decisively than the preceding pause might have suggested. “Godfrey in Buenos Aires, Cole in Havana as soon as possible, and then we can work something out with Poppy. That one won’t be so easy… but setting something up with Godfrey obviously won’t be a problem, and the ELF will jump at the chance to host you in Cuba. This would be good outreach even without the mind-reading angle, because—”
“I really need you all to stop saying mind-reading,” Dan interrupted. “Sorry, but I do. I can’t dive into your memories or anything like that, I can only hear thoughts that are basically on the tip of your tongue. If you set up a meeting with someone who knows about thoughts and language, I’d be able to read his thoughts and explain this thing properly. But I feel weird enough knowing you guys know I can hear your thoughts… I don’t need you thinking I can rummage through your minds and read all the way down.”
Smiling at what was a minor point in the scheme of things, Emma leaned over and kissed him in acknowledgment of the clarification. “Okay… so this would be good outreach even without the thought-hearing angle, because it gives the ELF and GCC leaderships something to think about besides attacking each other, and it also tells the public you’re serious about unity and gives them hope that it’s possible. I looked at the SMMA app on my phone as soon as Godfrey’s speech ended, to see the live social media reaction, and it’s not pretty. War isn’t a real prospect for a thousand good reasons, but people are worried about it. A lot of people here aren’t happy with Godfrey for being so reckless, and no one is happy with Cole being Cole or with Ding freezing non-ELF scientists out of the triangle analysis.”
“What do people think about the triangles?” Timo asked. “That analysis app used to show you breakdowns of individual topics, didn’t it, like we saw back in the IDA and Il Diavolo days?”
She turned her phone around to show Timo the relevant graphs and charts. “Yesterday it was fifty-fifty between people thinking the Zanzibar triangle was real or a hoax,” she said, commenting on the visual data for the benefit of the others who couldn’t quite see it from their positions. “After the second one turned up in Vanuatu, which most people had heard of for the very first time when Cole mentioned it twenty minutes earlier, the balance tipped towards a majority of people thinking it’s a hoax.”
“What do you think?” Tara asked her, very directly. “I know we’ve talked about it, and about how maybe Cole knew it was in Vanuatu before he mentioned Vanuatu… as a trap for Godfrey to call it out as a hoax when really it’s not… but what do you think?”
“Ninety-five percent of me thinks it’s a hoax,” Emma said, choosing her words carefully. “But we share more than ninety-five percent of our DNA with chimps. Sometimes it’s that five percent that makes all the difference.”
“Should I call Godfrey to talk about setting something up as soon as possible?” Timo asked. “I don’t mean to interrupt, but…”
Emma moved her hand in a horizontal motion to tell him to think nothing of it. “Let’s leave Godfrey out of the setup, though,” she said. “I’ll go to Slater so she can broker it. I don’t want Godfrey to feel like he’s in control and I want him to know how pissed off Dan is by what he just said. And Dan, I also think we should tell Slater you were contacted last night, then we’ll see if she wants to tell Godfrey right away or if she keeps it inside her own administration.”
“Can’t we just be straightforward and tell them both?” he asked.
Emma shook her head. “I want to know how close they really are, or how much of their new buddy act is just for the cameras. This is free information we can get with no extra effort. It also keeps Godfrey’s ego in check if I go to Slater and not him. Okay? I know you don’t like this scheming kind of stuff, but I’m not asking you to do it… I’m just asking you if you’re okay with me doing it on your behalf.”
“It’s gotten us this far,” Dan said with a knowing but ultimately warm smile.
Emma picked up her
phone and dialled the number. “President Slater,” she said a few seconds later, walking away from the others to focus on the call but not walking out of earshot. “Yes, it’s nice to hear your voice, too. But tell me… are you alone right now?”
V minus 52
GCC Headquarters
Buenos Aires, Argentina
“I’m alone,” President Slater said. “Well, just me and a few aides. He’s not here, if that’s what you meant.”
Emma detected enough implied resentment in Slater’s tone to think that at least some of it was for show. “I did mean Godfrey, but it doesn’t really matter if he hears this from you or from us, I just wanted you to hear it first. I tried to call you ten minutes ago, before he got into that ridiculous speech he just gave.”
In the silence Emma left hoping Slater might fill it with a telling sigh or comment, nothing audible came through her phone.
“Anyway,” she went on, “I wanted to tell you that Dan was contacted again last night and that this time it was a physical meeting. They spoke to him and he spoke to them. They didn’t give any explicitly clear-cut answers to some of the questions he asked, which will no doubt be the same ones you would have asked yourself, but Dan wants to tell you all about it.”
The Final Call Page 19
