“I did,” Slater replied, “but that was when you were at home. I’m sure we could find a medical centre here that can assist, though; from what I’ve learned, it’s a very basic device.”
“I’ll sort something out for you,” Godfrey interjected. “We have an in-house doctor, or you can go to the university hospital. I’d understand if you have some hang-ups about using the GCC doctor, so I won’t take offence in the slightest.”
Dan subtly established a connection to Godfrey, immediately sensing that his intentions were pure; he wasn’t trying to do anything funny with the chips. Dan also knew he would be able to listen in to the doctors to gauge their intentions, and he really did want the chip gone before he left for Cuba, an ELF member state where it might prove more difficult to find a doctor he could trust.
“We’ll use your doctor,” Dan said, nodding at Godfrey then turning to Emma. She couldn’t hear Godfrey’s thoughts but had seen Dan subtly moving his fingers to establish the connection so knew that he had already listened in.
“Works for me,” she said. “We’ll shoot this video first, then go to the doctor before we head back to the plane.”
“Excellent. And you can shoot your video anywhere in the building you like,” Godfrey said, “just please don’t let anyone talk to Dan.”
Emma, Dan and President Slater all thought the same thing when Godfrey said this, but kept to themselves the point that no one would have to talk to Dan for him to hear them.
He wouldn’t be listening to any lowly GCC staff members’ thoughts or indeed anyone else’s in Buenos Aires, though, for Dan’s interest now lay solely in Cuba and Honduras. His interest, as it always had and always would, lay in finding the truth.
V minus 44
McCarthy Residence
Birchwood, Colorado
All day, Clark’s mind had been fixated on what Dan and Emma were doing in Buenos Aires.
He feared nothing more than Dan foolishly telling Godfrey and Slater about his new abilities, and the fact that Emma would never go along with such a move — particularly when it came to Godfrey — was the only thing that eased his mind.
Work at the precinct occupied his hands, at least, and by the time night came he returned home relatively relaxed. Dan had called a few times by then, drip-feeding news as it came in. The trend-tracker above the couch where Clark was now reclined had beeped shortly after each of Dan’s calls when the news became public, but no one had been home at the time to hear it.
At work, which had been relatively normal in recent months while Dan maintained the lowest public profile he could, Clark had once again spent the day as the centre of everyone’s attention. He didn’t know what to say when they asked how he felt about Dan flying to Cuba to interview John Cole and to Honduras to interview Poppy Bradshaw, because he didn’t know how he felt. He understood and supported the reasoning, since Dan’s ability to discern their private thoughts would imminently blow apart the whole triangle mystery one way or the other, but a huge part of him felt that there was too much inherent risk for this to be the right course of action.
In Clark’s mind, there was never really going to be a political escalation of the kind that would lead to a military conflict between China and the United States; there just couldn’t be. His own instinct would have been to wait and see what happened next, but Dan’s evident concerns about the Messengers and their Elders was something that couldn’t be ignored. Dan knew them better than anyone and he had reported seeing genuine concern in their eyes, as well as sensing a real frustration in their thoughts over the fact that they couldn’t tell him everything.
Clark could also very well understand Dan’s desire to do something, especially after how helpless he had been temporarily rendered in the wake of Il Diavolo’s discovery the previous year. If Dan hadn’t taken massive and highly risky action on that occasion, Clark knew very well that neither of them would still be around to ponder the merits of such action this time.
Dan and Emma were now ready to head to Cuba with a news crew which included Kyle Young from ACN, a man who wasn’t just a McCarthy ally but one who Clark knew personally and respected a great deal for the risks he had taken on their behalf in the past. This very welcome news further eased Clark’s mind and made the fact that Emma and Dan were set to land in Havana the following morning much easier to handle. The only person he would have chosen over Kyle was Trey Myers, a once-local newsman and close friend who had moved out of state for a work opportunity a few months earlier. As a family man, Clark doubted Trey would have been up for such a risky-sounding trip, in any case.
In Clark’s experienced mind, however, the chances of a security incident were minuscule. The Cubans knew what they were doing on that front, and Dan’s telepathic advantage over Cole left Clark confident that the interview itself should go pretty damn well; after all, Dan could link-up with Emma to covertly use her PR expertise and unrivalled skill to box Cole in and avoid any lexical traps he tried to lay.
All in all, he didn’t see much rational cause for concern.
Long after midnight had come and gone, Tara called to tell Clark that she wouldn’t be home and to ask if he could either stay next door with Rooster or let him stay at the McCarthys’ for the night.
Clark was glad to get the call, which settled his mild concern as to why she was already so much later than the time she’d expected to be home from the promotional appearance she was making at a new nightclub in Colorado Springs.
In a selfless sense he was also fairly pleased to hear the reason she wouldn’t be home: something had sparked between her and Jayson Moore, a former TV star who was now on the right side of the same kind of fame-related substance abuse problems Clark had been worrying that Tara was slipping into. Jayson had been doing the media rounds lately to promote a warts-and-all autobiography, and he spent most of his days speaking in schools about self-esteem and drug-related topics.
There was admittedly more than a slight pang of regret inside Clark when he heard Tara was staying with Jayson, which momentarily made him consider something he’d been trying to ignore for a long time, but he firmly believed Jayson would be good for her. And given how much he cared about her, as well as how clearly her troubles had been weighing on Emma, that consideration drowned out the other in his mind.
Clark opted to collect Rooster and to sleep in his own bed while the dog rested in the living room; he was never any trouble, so the still-awake Henry didn’t mind, either.
All said, it was a pleasant night in Birchwood, Colorado.
As Clark McCarthy’s head hit the pillow, he tried not to think too much about the day that would follow.
TUESDAY
V minus 43
Private Jet
Havana, Cuba
“Where’s Emma?” Dan asked, waking in his usual seat inside Timo Fiore’s plane after a far longer sleep than he realised. He glanced at his phone and gasped. “And how the hell did it get so late?”
The woman in front of Dan, wearing a government-issued security pass which identified her as an ACN technician by the name of Alice Haines, didn’t look overly concerned but did seem to have something on her mind. “How much do you remember about last night?” she replied with a question of her own.
Dan thought in silence for a few seconds then uneasily shifted his weight. “Nothing.”
Alice nodded. “Figures. You’ve been sound asleep for seventeen hours, Dan. Emma told everyone you were just mentally exhausted, and that all you needed was a good sleep and you’d be good as gold. She didn’t want to wake you until you absolutely had to get up, and she didn’t want to leave you until she absolutely had to head out to meet some people and make sure everything is in order. You should probably call her, though.”
“Did she ask you to stay here to make sure I was okay?” Dan asked, this question rising above many others in his mind to escape his lips first.
“One of us had to,” Alice said, not sounding overly resentful at having been chosen for the
task. “Kyle stayed at first when I was setting some things up for a broadcast at the airport’s entrance — big crowd — but then we swapped places so he could do his thing. I don’t know how much you remember from yesterday afternoon but there was a lot of negotiation with the Cubans about how big our crew could be, so we’re thin on the ground.”
Dan’s eyes widened in shock. “Cubans? We’re in Cuba?”
“Dan…” Alice said, overt concern now very much filling her expression, “what’s the last thing you do remember??
He answered without hesitation: “Falling asleep just after we took off.”
“Just after you took off from…?”
“Denver, obviously. And we were supposed to be landing in Buenos Aires, not Cuba! I need to see Godfrey and Slater about something.”
Alice gulped. “You met them yesterday and set up this trip. It’s Tuesday, Dan.”
Dan glanced again at his phone, this time taking notice of the date rather than the time. To his amazement, it really was Tuesday. He closed his eyes tightly for a brief moment to empty his mind. Instead of ruminating on the fact that he had somehow lost a whole day — the time for thinking about that would come when Emma rather than Alice was in front of him — he tried to focus on getting out of this situation.
He reached into an almost empty well of energy and forced the loudest laugh he could. “Aww man, Alice… you should have seen your face!”
Alice looked confused for a second before breaking into a roaring laugh of her own. “God damnit, you got me! If you can keep your cards that close to your chest when you’re interviewing Cole, this is going to go great. I’m gonna check Kyle is doing okay, but be as quick as you can.”
“Yeah,” Dan said, very glad that Alice was already facing the plane’s exit when he said this, as it meant she didn’t see his face reacting to the latest shock of an apparently imminent interview with John Cole. He typed a succinct message on his phone and sent it to Emma without delay:
“Can you come back to the plane? I really need you… right now.”
V minus 42
Plaza de la Revolucíon
Havana, Cuba
“It just doesn’t make sense,” Dan said, still ruminating on his apparent short-term amnesia a full hour after first telling Emma about it. They were now sitting alone together in the back of a secure vehicle that was slowing to a halt at the spot where Dan would get out.
“Of course it doesn’t,” Emma replied, “but just try to remember what we talked about, okay? There are a hell of a lot of things we don’t know right now, but we know a lot more than anyone else. The Messengers gave you a gift to help us through a turbulent time, and if these symptoms are a side effect then we just have to deal with them… none of that changes what we came here to do, and it’s something the Messengers will correct as soon as they can. Try to trust them; they already saved us once.”
Dan nodded. He did trust them, but that wasn’t the problem. The problem, as he saw it, was that there might be a scenario in which the Messengers wanted to return but couldn’t. If the problem with their Elders prevented them from coming back, would he be stuck like this?
One of the symptoms — plural — that Emma alluded to was self-evidently Dan’s complete inability to remember any of the previous day. The other, more manageable but still unsettling, was the most prolonged migraine-like headache of Dan’s life. He could only put this down to the mental exertion of having listened to Godfrey and Slater’s thoughts during those forgotten hours, something Emma reminded him of in great detail, and he was therefore more than a little concerned about how he would feel during and after his telepathic cross-examination of ELF Western Secretary John Cole.
Dan couldn’t remember anything about the government-implanted chip in his neck being removed by a GCC doctor before he returned to the plane to leave Buenos Aires, but Emma assured him he had listened to the doctor’s thoughts at the time and had trusted her completely. Emma’s chip had been removed too, so it seemed unlikely that the very straightforward and almost painless removal procedure was in any way responsible for his symptoms.
What Dan understood least of all was why the previous day was absent from his memory but the one before it wasn’t. If everything since the Messengers’ recent visit and Dan’s recent empowerment had been lost to the recesses of his mind, that would have been unsettling but at least comprehensible. As it was, he didn’t even have comprehensibility to fall back on.
In light of all of this, the high-profile and internationally televised interview that Dan was about to conduct with Cole wasn’t playing on his mind in and of itself. He was here to find out what Cole was thinking, and particularly what he did or didn’t know about the triangles that would soon be paraded in Beijing. How Dan came across in the interview wasn’t even a secondary concern, because he had no motive beyond leaving Cuba with an insight he couldn’t get anywhere else.
Emma, prior to knowing how little he was worrying about this part of the matter, had tried to ease Dan’s mind by showing him some Social Media Meta Analysis data which revealed that the general public were understandably far more fixated on what was soon going to be revealed in China than what struck many as just another media appearance in Cuba. Needless to say, none had any idea that the forthcoming interview was anything but run-of-the-mill.
“My voice will be in your head and your head will be in the game,” Emma whispered as a security official opened her door upon their arrival at Havana’s famous Plaza de la Revolucíon. “We’ll work through everything else together until the Messengers come back, but this is what we came for.”
Dan nodded, trying to look and feel more confident than he really was.
“We’ve got this,” Emma went on, squeezing his hand and smiling sweetly. “I love you, Dan McCarthy, and there’s nothing we can’t do.”
V minus 41
McCarthy Residence
Birchwood, Colorado
“Is Clark around?” Timo Fiore asked, standing alone at the McCarthy’s doorstep and asking the question of Henry.
“Not yet,” Henry replied. He was sufficiently accustomed to the world’s richest man dropping by in Birchwood that Timo’s presence didn’t shock him, but it did seem unusual for him to turn up without calling ahead. “But he definitely wanted to be home from work in time to see Dan’s interview with Cole, so he should be here any minute. Come on in.”
Timo stepped inside the familiar house, one where he felt entirely at ease among small-town friends who could see past his bank balance and had taken to him like one of their own. He sat on the couch and glanced at the TV, awestruck at the size of the crowd that had gathered in Havana to catch a glimpse of Dan before he ventured indoors for his high-stakes interview.
The visit was being reported internationally as an outreach mission, with the general narrative holding that Dan had persuaded Godfrey to extend an olive branch — in the form of Dan himself — in an effort to bridge the growing gap between the GCC and ELF and to ease the associated tension.
Timo, of course, knew why Dan was really there. Any detente would be a tremendously welcome side-effect, however, so he very much hoped that one came to pass.
“I got some news a matter of minutes ago,” Timo announced to Henry. But just as he spoke, Clark bounded through the door.
“Did I make it?” the elder McCarthy brother asked. “Oh… hey, Timo.”
Timo pointed to the screen. “You made it. And I was just telling your dad: I found out something very interesting right before I got here. I tried to reach Emma or Dan or even Kyle but I couldn’t get through to any of them. I’d like Dan to know this before the interview and theoretically we could still go to Slater and ask for a message to be passed to them via the security team in the next few minutes, but right now I think we need to keep this close to our chest. And really, this information will still be useful so long as he learns of it before he interviews Poppy tomorrow.”
Clark, more than intrigued, plumped himself down in
the armchair. “What’s the deal? Did you find a link between Cole and the GeoSovs, like you’ve had people looking for?”
“They found a link, but not that one. The GeoSovs and Poppy in particular are proving tough nuts to crack. My team has also been looking into a shell company linked to Cole’s overseas consultancy business, though — and when I say ‘linked’, I mean indisputably so — and we’ve found a series of very recent and very substantial payments to an American company which is itself almost completely hidden by a web of holding companies. Again, this next link is indisputable and my team have one hundred percent certainty in what they’ve found.”
“So what the hell kind of link have they found?” Henry interrupted. “What’s the American company Cole’s working with?”
“It’s a media management and PR firm,” Timo said, “but it’s more about the who than the what…”
V minus 40
ELF Western Office
Havana, Cuba
Dan McCarthy did all he could to dissociate from the enormity of the moment as he waved to an impossibly vast crowd from the shadow of an imposing monument to Jose Martí, a hero of the Cuban independence movement.
Facing the enormous tributes to Che Guevara and Camile Cienfuegos that adorned the buildings beyond the near million-strong crowd, it was all but impossible for Dan to bear the weight of history on his shoulders as he stood in the same spot from which the likes of Pope John Paul II, and of course the Castros themselves, had famously addressed equally large gatherings.
The Final Call Page 22
