The smiling faces before him warmed his heart — the people were so glad to see him; so glad that he had come to their little corner of the world — but the tension of the day made it one he could only hope to endure rather than enjoy.
John Cole, well dressed in a subtly pinstriped grey suit, approached a podium to a smattering of seemingly reluctant applause before booming out his appreciation for Dan’s visit. Surprisingly, there were no barbs at Godfrey and not even a fleeting mention of the triangles. Cole instead praised Dan’s “internationalist outlook” and, although stopping short of overtly issuing thanks or giving Godfrey or Slater a name-check, went on to share his “unreserved satisfaction” that “senior GCC figures” had played a part in making the visit happen.
A local interpreter relayed Cole’s words to the crowd, bringing far more applause than had the controversial man’s initial stepping forward. Dan gazed down at Kyle Young, who was standing at the front of the crowd with his barebones ACN crew. Those crew members would be the only people in the room with Dan and Cole when proceedings moved into the grand Ministerio del Interior building at the far side of the plaza.
Dan’s turn to address the crowd came next, and he rattled off the words Emma was giving him. He could never truly get used to this, but in a very real sense it was beginning to trouble him just how ‘normal’ his one-way telepathic ability was already starting to feel.
“It’s an honour to be here,” he began, earning raucous applause even before the local interpreter followed up his English comment with a running Spanish translation for the benefit of the largely monolingual crowd. “I don’t think it will be news to anyone to hear that Mr Cole and I don’t see eye-to-eye on very many things, but the fact that we’re standing here together and are about to sit down together is indicative of a desire on all sides to work past petty divisions as our entire planet wrestles with some big questions about the Zanzibar and Vanuatu triangles. I wish I could hang around afterwards but I have to move straight on to Honduras, so until I have a chance to come back… Viva Cuba!”
One of the Cuban officials beside the podium stepped towards Dan and raised his arm before the adoring crowd. John Cole weaselled his way to the man’s other side, grabbing his free hand and raising it to complete the most unlikely three-person picture anyone could ever have anticipated just a few days earlier.
“Viva Cuba!” Cole yelled, insatiably soaking in the adulation as though it was his own.
Dan forced himself to keep smiling, but the reality was sinking in that he was almost certainly in for one of the most unpleasant half-hours of his life.
V minus 39
GCC Headquarters
Buenos Aires, Argentina
While watching footage of Dan in Cuba, where John Cole was ingratiating himself to the locals even more shamelessly than expected, William Godfrey received a message on his phone from a high-priority contact.
He glanced at the screen, making sure Slater didn’t see, and learned that it was from his doctor:
“Nothing suspicious, the chip was what they said it was and nothing more. Dan’s had transmitted a signal on one occasion, Emma’s on no occasion.”
“Anything important?” Slater asked, wondering what was commanding Godfrey’s attention more than the live images from Havana.
He turned the phone around so she could see it. “No one was lying about the chip,” he said. “Not the idiot agents who told them it was only there to transmit a signal if something happened with the pain receptors in their necks, or however the science part works, and not Dan and Emma when they told us he hadn’t been contacted apart from that one night in Italy.”
“Dan and Emma wouldn’t lie to us,” Slater said, trying to figure out what motivated Godfrey to show her the text and making sure not to let slip that there were certain things the couple had told her but not him.
Godfrey nodded and put his phone away. “You know, Valerie, I’m slowly starting to realise that’s true.”
V minus 38
ELF Western Office
Havana, Cuba
As soon as Dan stepped into the ELF’s new Western Office, which was located in a small portion of a large building otherwise occupied by Cuba’s Interior Ministry, he knew without doubt that its opening had been massively expedited. There were exposed wires hanging overhead in the semi-renovated corridor and similar telltale signs on the floor.
It reminded Dan of his first visit to the Fiore Frontiere building in Colorado Springs, when Timo had insisted the place was “ready enough” to host a press conference. After what happened to Timo and Emma that day, it went without saying that Dan hoped the similarities would end there.
New thoughts were the last thing Dan needed, but he couldn’t help but ponder what this clear rush job suggested. The office had been announced when Cole stood at Ding’s side in Zanzibar, so on the face of it it seemed like that first triangle’s discovery — by placing the ELF in a position of strength and the GCC on the defensive — had presented an opportunity too good to miss. Of course, a pillar holding up this belief was the assumption that the triangles were indeed truly extraterrestrial, or were at the very least not part of an elaborate hoax perpetrated by the ELF.
Or it could all be mind games, Dan thought. Because surely they could have tidied up better than this? Maybe they want me to think it looks rushed, so I buy their bullshit about the triangles? As convoluted as that kind of tactic would be, it’s nothing compared to what Walker pulled on everyone…
“So we all know how this is going to go?” Kyle Young asked as soon as the small and silent convoy reached the appropriate doorway. “This is live and uncensored, and I really don’t want to play Marian de Clerk. I’ll ask questions if I have to, but I’m expecting you both to allow each other to speak.”
Dan knew Kyle had been talking exclusively to Cole so didn’t take the firmness of his tone to heart; they were good friends, with Cole’s behaviour their common concern.
“We’re all friends here,” Cole replied, speaking with such a straight face that Dan couldn’t help but admire how much his lying had improved.
Before stepping into the small interview room, Dan waved goodbye to Emma. Her absence had been a condition of Cole’s participation, but Dan had utter faith that the telepathic connection he’d established with her earlier in the day would continue to work despite her now being out of his sight. They had tested this thoroughly, and there was no reason for it to change; the previous day’s absence from Dan’s memory had no bearing on what had come before, and the Messengers’ promise that his ability to mentally control the telepathy would improve was continuing to come more and more true.
For despite having forgotten everything that had happened the previous day, Dan deeply understood that he was now able to use his gift with far more finesse than he had been at first. Like a child learning to write, his dexterity was growing with each minute’s practice. He subtly positioned his fingers to establish a connection with Cole and found that he was able to effortlessly shift his focus from Cole’s thoughts to Emma’s at will, and — quite astoundingly — even to adjust the mental ‘volume’ of each while listening in to both at once. The whole thing was incredible, and it took no small effort on Dan’s part not to experience paralysis through analysis in wondering how any of it was possible.
“I’m still here,” Emma told him, very deliberately sending the thought his way. “I’m watching and listening, so if you ever get stuck just say what I tell you and this will all go well. Now go get ’em. Game face!”
This assurance that Emma’s expertise was still at his fingertips, fairly literally, brought Dan back into the moment. With her pulling the strings, there really was nothing they couldn’t do.
Kyle read some short introductory remarks from the autocue before flinging a softball question Dan’s way about the reception he’d received outside.
Smiling, Dan reiterated the honour he felt at being in Cuba and said little of substance. He had some notes on his lap
in case his link-up with Emma failed for one unforeseen reason or another, and if he had needed to look down at the first bullet point he would have been advised to keep things light during the intro.
With that out of the way, he focused on Cole’s response to Kyle’s next question about the triangles.
Two things became apparent very quickly. First, while Cole’s pseudo-verbal thoughts were no harder to access than anyone else’s, they were certainly less focused and more scattershot. Second, and far more troublingly, Dan realised in no time at all that Cole fully believed that the triangles were genuine alien artefacts.
If Cole’s thoughts had exposed the triangles as hoaxes, international politics would have been set to enter its rockiest period for decades. But had that been the case, Dan would have felt that the problem — a human one — was at least solvable by humans. But if the triangles were real after all… then what?
If the Messengers couldn’t come back… then what?
What the hell was going on?
Dan found himself in the horrible position of clinging on to an increasingly faint hope that the triangles might be a GeoSov hoax that the ELF had swallowed hook, line and sinker and was now selling to the rest of the world in the same way he himself had sold the IDA leak after buying the bullshit from Richard Walker.
Fool the shepherd and the sheep will follow, Dan pondered, recalling Ben Gold’s fateful words on the night he confessed his knowledge of the hoax before the guilt pushed him to take his own life. Tonight, Dan hoped that Poppy Bradshaw and her shadowy associates had chosen Ding Ziyang as their hoax’s shepherd.
The only remotely plausible hoax-related alternative was that Ding himself was behind an elaborate hoax and had somehow conned Cole and recruited him as a mindless battering ram to smash into his enemies in Buenos Aires, but Dan couldn’t for the life of him see any logic for such a move; and beyond that, he knew Ding was too smart to play with a fire as wild as his ELF’s new Western Secretary.
Deflated and more than a little disappointed by how little Cole knew, Dan went into autopilot for the rest of the interview. He repeated questions and answers as Emma remotely fed them into his mind, which felt like it was tiring as the thirty minutes wore on. With five to go and with nothing Earth-shattering having come out as Cole struck an unprecedentedly diplomatic tone throughout, a strong headache began to build behind Dan’s eyes.
The only time Cole seemed to lose his cool came with two minutes remaining, and his ire was directed squarely at Kyle.
“There’s been some speculation swirling around about your personal connections to certain individuals you might not want the world to know you’re connected to,” the newsman boldly stated. “Do you know anything about that speculation, like why it might have come about?”
If anything worthwhile was going to come from a mind that had so far exposed itself as being as blank as most people might have guessed, Dan knew it would come now. He focused fully on Cole and heard the all-important thought loud and clear:
“He can’t know that Jack’s involved. We covered our tracks…”
As Cole searched for words to speak aloud, the ones he didn’t say led Dan to fight a gasp. He covered his mouth and pretended to scratch his cheek.
“Is that a no?” Kyle said. “Because some people have said that you and Poppy Bradshaw seemed less at odds on Focus 20/20 than—”
At that, Cole slammed his fist into the table. “The GeoSovs are vermin and should be treated as such!” he boomed. “Apologise for that insinuation or this interview is over.”
One more thing was now clear to Dan courtesy of the inner thoughts that underlined Cole’s outburst: he truly did despise Poppy and her colleagues.
“We only have two minutes left,” Kyle replied, “but I really think—”
Cole stood up. “Well, don’t say I didn’t warn you. Dan… a pleasure as always. Give my regards to Chairman Godfrey. We’re serious about outreach, given… well, all of this. Goodbye for now.”
“Sure thing,” Dan replied, “and thanks for giving this a shot.” Exchanging pleasantries with Cole stuck in his throat, but it was for the greater good.
Cole wasn’t lying about hating Poppy — his thoughts made that much abundantly clear — and Dan’s realisation that the triangles weren’t part of an ELF hoax had further entrenched in his own mind the importance of global unity. If an Elder-related problem had indeed come down from above, a planet divided had no hope of solving whatever it might turn out to be.
Dan wanted nothing more than to push Cole on the point about Jack being involved, since the Jack in question absolutely had to be Jack Neal — Cole’s former ally and a sworn enemy of both President Slater and GCC Chairman Godfrey. That was a complication and revelation Dan hadn’t even considered possible let alone likely, but posing any kind of follow-up question was out of the question; without having heard Cole’s thought, there would have been absolutely no grounds for such a context-lacking query.
Dan couldn’t imagine that Cole would have jumped to the assumption that Dan was somehow inside his head, but the remotest chance of such a jump occurring — especially on live TV — was something that had to be avoided at all costs.
And so it went that Dan bit his tongue and helped Kyle through the final minutes of an interview that millions of underwhelmed viewers around the world would soon be criticising as something of a damp squib.
But although Dan McCarthy hadn’t gotten what he went in hoping to find, he was coming out with something. Where it would lead, he didn’t know. A large part of him didn’t even want to consider it, and in that moment all he wanted to do was tell Emma and lie down.
His head ached, even more than it had right after he woke up. He wanted to sleep — he needed to sleep — and only time would tell whether he would remember any of this. This new-found uncertainty over his own powers of recollection carried Dan towards Emma as soon as Kyle’s cameraman announced that time was up.
Kyle sighed, knowing full well that things hadn’t gone as explosively as he or the network had hoped, but Dan was too preoccupied to offer any words of consolation or support.
“We need to get to the car so we can talk,” Dan uttered breathlessly as soon as he opened the door and casually pulled Emma out of everyone else’s earshot. “Cole is with Jack, one hundred percent.”
Emma stood stunned for several seconds, a speechless reaction Dan could never recall seeing from her. Eventually, her shoulders sunk and her head shook slowly. “Of all the things it could have been,” she sighed, “it had to be that one.”
“What do you think it means?” Dan asked, whispering and waiting for a spoken reply having effortlessly disabled his mind’s active link-up with Emma’s. Her thoughts were always clearer than anyone else’s, but he didn’t like listening in when he didn’t have to.
“I think it means everything’s a hundred times messier than we thought,” she replied, walking as she spoke. “I think we need to keep this to ourselves until we hear what Poppy knows and how it fits in with all of this. I think we need to keep this quiet for now because as soon as we’ve finished with Poppy, I know that we need to find that son of a bitch before he knows we’re looking for him.”
V minus 37
McCarthy Residence
Birchwood, Colorado
Timo, Henry and Clark sat in the living room discussing what they’d just seen, the TV muted as a series of ACN in-studio analysts did the very same. Underwhelming was the word of the day, but no one within Dan’s inner circle saw that as a bad thing.
Living in hope that Dan had heard something in Cole’s thoughts that would move their understanding of the situation forward, all three were eagerly anticipating the phone call Emma had promised just as soon as she returned to the plane.
Clark’s phone rang before too long, but it wasn’t Emma.
“Hey!” Tara’s voice excitedly boomed through the speaker, effortlessly reaching Henry and Timo as though making its way into one of Clark’s ears and es
caping the other at equal volume. “That was fine, right? He did okay?”
“It looked fine, but are you alone?” Clark asked. “If you are, there’s something we found out that you’ll be interested in. If you’re not, we can’t talk about any of this.”
“Jayson is in the bathroom right now, but yeah I guess maybe I’ll wait to talk about it when I’m home. I’ll definitely be back tonight, we’re just heading out to look at an old cabin in the woods he’s renovating. Do you still have Rooster in with you? I will be home, one hundred percent, but I might be late.”
“Yeah, he’s here. See you tomorrow. And remember, Tara: no talking.”
“Love ya,” she replied, ending the call in the same excited tone she’d started it with.
Clark held on to his phone, imploring it to ring again.
“She seems more like the girl I remember,” Henry mused. “Happy.”
As Clark began to speak, his phone rang again. “Dan! Hey, man!” he said, answering as quickly as he could. “You okay? That looked like it went pretty well and you might be thinking that Cole wouldn’t have eased up on the GCC without Ding okaying it, but we think there’s something else going on here. Timo’s people found a recent link between Cole and Jack Neal’s new PR firm. They’re working together on something, but we don’t know if it has anything to do with any of this triangle stuff.”
“I just heard Cole thinking about Jack!” Dan revealed. “Do you know how many other people know? This has to stay quiet until I’ve spoken to Poppy and we get home.”
Timo held his hand out, requesting the phone from Clark, and got it. “Very few people know what my team discovered, Dan,” he said, “and like I mentioned before: I trust this team completely.”
Like Timo had received one phone from Clark, Emma quickly received the other from Dan and proceeded to stress just how right he was that any suggestion of Cole working with Jack had to be kept under wraps for now. The strength of her words and tone surprised no one — they knew her well enough by now to know that along with her unnerving knack for identifying the right way to handle delicate situations came a ruthless opposition to any suggestion of pursuing the wrong ways — but the number of times Emma repeated the same point was unusual.
The Final Call Page 23
