"Cope here."
"Oscar Copeman? You don't know me, but I need you to call a special number. I'm with the federal government here in Ottawa. You can do that for me? "
"My pension's coming early?"
"Not so far as I know. Maybe something can be arranged, but that's not why I'm calling."
"Discount on duct cleaning, I bet. Who do I call?"
"The Prime Minister's Office."
"Right. Sure. How will I know it's the Prime Minister's Office. Sorry to be so skeptical, but that's how I am."
"I'll leave you to figure that out. Just call the House of Commons and tell whoever answers, 'Schedule F, Bobolink'. Got that? I'll call back in an hour and check that you got through."
"Do you have the number of the House of Commons?"
"I'll leave you to find that out."
It took fifteen minutes. There were four layers of people who had to look up whatever Schedule F was, then make the next connection. Then Cope was talking, as far as he could tell, to the Prime Minister's secretary. "Oscar Copeman, Schedule F, Bobolink," he said to the guy who answered.
"Oh, really? What's your agent number?"
Oscar gave him the whole thing.
"You're sure you recognized an American agent in Brighton."
"Knew him in Afghanistan. Not sure what he's doing now."
"Our records show him probably working for one arm of the US government. He and Sammy, the guy with him, have done a number of intelligence jobs for the Yanks up this way."
"We let them do that?"
"Most of the time, if it's in our interest too. We didn't know anything about this thing."
"How can I help?"
"There's an object on the bottom of Popham Bay. We don't want it disturbed, especially by the Americans."
"Are they likely to?"
"We don't know. They might claim it's something they lost. Don't believe it."
"I'm not sure I can arm-wrestle the young guy. And Lester's still got a few tricks up his sleeve, I imagine. Can you send in a squad and a couple of tanks?"
"Not going to happen at this point. I'm going to give you a number. If you need help of any sort, just call it, and we'll get something out of Trenton as quick as we can. And here's the direct number to me. I'm Ronald." Ronald gave Cope two numbers. "Good luck," he added.
Cope looked at his phone. "What the fuck?" he said into the silence.
****
Virginia
Phone conversation to the White House
Day before Button Day
"Johnny! I wanted to speak to the President. The big guy himself."
"Well, you might have to tell me. 'John', is it now?"
"This sort of thing should go a bit higher, possibly."
"Possibly?"
"We might have a Blue Arrow event."
"Might. What's this 'might'."
"Unregistered cold war asset on Canadian soil. The Canadians might have found it."
"Shit. This is an election year, you know. He shouldn't have this to deal with, what with the economy to handle."
"Look; he can blame it on a previous administration. He was a kid when the cold war happened."
"He's too stupid for that. Next thing you know he'll lie about it and cover it up and get caught. Shit! He's too stupid to be more than Mayor of Boise. Just what we need, to piss off the Canadians. We're going for deniability if it gets out. Can you cover it up?"
"I'll try, but I'd like a couple of assets for backup."
"I can get you something, maybe, but if it's in Canada, no weapons, not even a pea shooter. That's the only hope we have if we get caught. Is that clear?"
"Got it."
"I'll get back to you. See what we can do off the record."
"Thanks, I guess."
"Yeah, you guess."
"Aren't you glad I kept you in the loop?"
"Aren't I glad you put my head in the noose?"
****
Brighton
Day before Button Day
There were two calls made to Brighton that day.
Laura found a message on her phone.
"Hi, cousin Laura. This is Tom. I'm In Belleville. I've dropped off a rental car and a rental canoe and I'm coming to visit you in Brighton. We'll have a great time. I mailed all my meds to Jasna, my social worker. Ha! Now the world is full of government plots and spies and space aliens! But I'm learning to like them. Where is the cottage you're renting?"
Laura sighed, then phoned back. He didn't answer, of course, but she left instructions. Tom was an ongoing tragedy, but she liked him even when he drove her nuts.
On the same day, the Daniels brothers got a call from Barb. She described the two men who'd visited her, and the questions they'd asked.
"One of them sounds like a guy named Clyde Books. He's part of Alien Hunters International," Jim noted.
"Dangerous?"
"Their success rate's pretty low. Humans got one of us by accident, but none of the hunter group's ever had a success. The other eleven of us should be out of here in a few days. We'll keep a watch out though, just in case. Thanks, Barb."
"You guys take care."
Jack had a solution. "The moment we leave, blow this planet to pieces."
"Illegal."
"The Empire's probably in chaos now. Nobody'll notice."
"Someone might."
"An ice age. Just crank up an ice age. A couple of good supervolcanoes and they'll be freezing in the dark. Serve them right."
"They're not all bad." Jim closed the conversation and poured a bourbon-and-cilantro.
****
Brighton
Along Popham Bay
The day before Button Day
Jack and Jim Daniels sat on the deck of the cottage, drinking cilantro in bourbon and watching the waves get larger over Popham Bay as the afternoon reached its peak. There was a constant grating of rocks on the shore, and a couple of townspeople walked slowly by, back from the edge where the vegetation stopped amid a few large tree trunks pushed in by last winter’s storms.
"Doesn't that grinding noise get you down?" Jack asked.
"Doesn't bother the locals, it seems. I guess this one planet is all they know."
"They'd miss it."
"The planet?"
"The grating noise. If we drained the lake for fuel."
Neither of them said anything more, but they knew things were soon going to happen under the bay. They’d arrived the day before driving the silver Camry that they kept stored in Scarborough, at some guy's place. Not that they knew the guy, but he didn’t drive and was happy to keep the Daniels’ car in his garage for a fee.
A half hour after arriving, when the cottage was aired a bit and the tea made, Jack had placed the small “rock” (which still vibrated a bit) into what looked like a souvenir Mexican ashtray. Immediately, the “ashtray” had begun to glow with a gentle blue light that was best seen with the window curtains closed. They’d watched in silence, not quite ready to start the power-up sequence in that ship out in the bay, the one that would take them home. It had been twenty-three years, after all.
A few hours later, sitting on the deck, they were both restless.
"Going to take at least a couple of days," Jack said. "Even after you push the button."
"Could be longer than that. The old ship's been sitting for a while. And you deserve the honour, anyway."
Jack had another piece of bread with some of Barb's jam on it. "A couple of days longer, maybe. Say ten days to get the automatic stuff going, then three or four days more for us to finish off." He didn't touch the button.
"Then we can ditch these bodies. I'm going to like that." Jim's host twitched a bit, until he delivered a bit more joy juice to the appropriate brain structures.
Jim turned as a green clue SUV pulled into the laneway of the cottage next door, visible through the swamp elms between. He saw the woman leave the car and go into her rental cottage. Just before she closed the door, she stopped an
d looked over towards the Daniels’ cottage, and waved. Jim waved back; Jack, deep in thought, hadn’t noticed.
They discussed Barb's call about the guy who might be Clyde Books.
“Odd, but probably nothing,” Jim said. “Everybody wants to spend time on the islands.”
“Well, apparently he wondered if we’d changed since we were young.”
That caught Jim’s attention. “One of the hunters, maybe?”
Jack sipped slowly. “It would be a shame to get taken down a week before lift-off, after all these years.” He picked up the rock that contained the "button" that would start things going.
He jumped as the crunching of leaves caught his attention. Both aliens-in-human-bodies turned, to see the woman from next door coming towards them.
She stopped at the edge of the deck. "Hi, she said." I'm renting the cottage next door for a couple of weeks. But I suppose you heard that from the rest of the village."
"We hear remarkably little from the rest of the village," Jack said. "We're outsiders to this place and don't communicate much with the locals. As far as they're concerned, people from Toronto might as well be space aliens from another galaxy."
Laura laughed. "I'm Laura Singer, and I live in New Hamburg. I was here only five hours before the entire town were making notes in their little books. Luckily, I'm only staying for a couple of weeks."
"I'm Jack Daniels, like in the whiskey, and this is my brother, Jim. You'll find people here ignore you after a few years. We've had this cottage twenty-three years and would you like some tea or a drink of bourbon with cilantro?"
"I'll take the bourbon and cilantro," Laura said. She found the steps to the deck and pulled up a Muskoka chair to the railing facing the lake. She put her feet on the railing, as Jack found a glass and poured her a drink. "Not bad," she said, after a sip.
Jim looked at her, surprised. "So what brings you to this place in September?" he said. "I'm naturally nosy, in case you're wondering."
"Well," Laura laughed, "I've convinced the locals that I'm after the Treasure of High Bluff Island."
"There's treasure out there?" Jack looked at the island suspiciously.
"Probably not. If the guy who lived there ever buried any money, it was probably found long ago."
"So what are you doing in this place? Running away from life?"
"Probably. Thanks." Laura held her glass up as Jim poured a refill. He also handed her a paper plate with cookies and jam on it. "I'm here to write a book about UFOs and space aliens in Ontario.
There was a long silence. "Why?"
"I've written a couple of books. There's a guy who prints books on Ontario topics. Just Ontario topics. They sell well enough to keep the publisher – he's a nice fellow by the way – in business. Anyway, this publisher did well by his first book on Ontario UFOs, so he suggested that he'd publish another, if I could come up with enough material."
"You didn't write the first one?"
"No, but that chick didn't think it was worth the effort to get any more data. It doesn't pay much to the writer, you know, and she'd got all the easy ones." Pause. "Good jam. You make it?"
"We get it in Toronto, on an island."
"Must write down the address for me, for next time I go there."
"Will do. There was a long pause. "Why did you… why would you pick Brighton as a place to look into UFOs? Just asking."
Laura laughed. "There were a couple of reports quite a while ago – more than 20 years ago, actually. A couple of teenagers – they're married now – on the beach in front of here say they saw something land in the bay out there."
"You believe that?" Jim asked.
Laura snorted. "It's all a crock of crap. There was also a report from one Bob Dalbine, who said a slimy thing took over his body for a while. I can work that into a lot of scenarios. Bug-eyed monsters hiding from Darth Vader and the Evil Galactic Empire."
"You think?"
"Four more, and I've got a book."
"They might not be down there forever," Jack said.
"The aliens? They could have very long lifetimes." She shifted. "I've got to be going I guess."
"We might have information."
Laura sat up. "You'll make something up for me?"
"We could do that. When's this book coming out?"
"Next year, maybe the year after that. These things take time. Well, I gotta go. Time to make supper." Laura got up, a bit unsteadily.
"We're ready to start power up."
"Pardon?" Laura stopped.
Jack looked at her seriously. "The spaceship. It's been there a long time. It'll take a while to power it up once we start."
"Bubbles? Will there be bubbles?"
"Pardon?"
"Don't these things make bubbles when they start up? I saw a movie, once."
Jim smiled. "Ghosts."
"That's a different book. I try to link UFOs and ghosts, and nobody'll believe it." Laura smiled as she went down the steps.
"Nothing in physics allows faster-than-light travel."
"Okay…." Laura looked up.
"We have to use a bit of metaphysics. Parapsychology. Astral medium. You humans don't have a good word for it."
"You're a space alien, and you use it?"
Jim joined his brother at the railing, and nodded. "That's about it. It underlies quantum physics and is so strange we don't understand a lot of it. But we use it, and it causes disturbances in the…."
"A disturbance in the Force." Laura laughed and started through the woods to her rental cottage.
"Well, maybe. Certainly a disturbance in this part of Ontario."
She turned and asked, "Unicorns?"
Jim shook his head. Not imaginary stuff. You'll see."
"I'll watch for it." She paused again. "Promise me bubbles when you leave?"
"If we can."
****
Brighton
Jag's Place, on a hill.
The day before Button Day
Jag looked out his glass patio doors at the lights of Brighton below. His house wasn’t on much of a hill, but then again, Brighton didn’t have many big hills. It had been founded in a valley beside a mill stream – now long gone – and the valley wasn’t all that much. Actually, Brighton wasn’t all that much, and perhaps that had been why he’d chosen it. He’d done his service in Afghanistan and had come home with a nervous habit of watching everything, all the time, a habit that his wife and son had found disconcerting.
The Metro Toronto Police had been happy to take him, once his police training had been completed.
And now he was in Brighton, alone in a smallish house on a smallish hillside as the early autumn sunset – blocked from his view by a large willow – ate the shadows and the town lights came on. The Ontario Provincial Police station was barely in view, as was the Dixie Lee fried-chicken outlet. Other than that, the place had the tranquility of a town of three thousand people seething in their own angst and criminal desires. You never knew when it would pop up. He smiled, for a change, and put on some Fred Eaglesmith music.
Jag checked the clock. Seven. He went to the basement and brought up a bottle of whiskey. Carefully he poured some into his special whiskey glass, up to the line marked on the side. Then he returned the bottle, which had a phone number prominently taped to the side. That was the number of his contact in the Police Drunks Not-So-Anonymous group, an organization that included members from a few of the small towns around. Getting drunk was pretty well expected among the police at police functions and at the occasional other social gathering. But for those cops who chose, especially those who lived alone with their thoughts, alcohol was an ever-present danger. If a member wanted to exceed his or her nightly maximum, the phone number was supposed to put him in contact with someone in the organization who would either talk him down or chaperone him through a binge. There were a lot more people that joined than people that stayed, but it worked for Jag.
After watching the town for ten minutes, he tur
ned on a small reading light and looked at the stack of books on the table. He was partway through a rereading of Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea, halfway through a second Crouch sailing mystery, Red Sky at Morning, and barely into a new Smith book, Raven's Bridge.
He reached instead for a thin book he’d driven a half-hour to Belleville library to borrow. The copy of The Minor Odyssey of Lollie Heronfeathers Singer wasn’t much used, but then Jag supposed most poetry books got thrown out of libraries long before they got worn from use.
Jag had called up Laura after the picnic, to ask her out to supper. She’d sounded hesitant, then suggested meeting in Trenton, ten miles away, in a couple of days.
He’d then spent a half-hour on the Web, searching for any information on Ms Singer. Finally, he’d found that she’d written a book of poetry under the name “Lollie Heronfeathers Singer” and that there wasn’t a copy available at any local bookstore, but there was one in the Belleville library.
After the trip to High Bluff Island, and a couple of hours after getting the supper date with Laura, he’d walked into the registry office.
Ten minutes later he was having a tea with Josie in a corner of the office. She brought out a bag of chocolate-chip cookies, which he declined. “Getting fat,” he explained. But she held out the bag until her arm started to tremble and he took one. It was home-made, and good.
“Heard you canoed to the island,” Josie said. She tilted her head froward to look over her glasses. “Looking for treasure were we?”
“Laura wanted to see the island.” There was a long pause. “She did some looking around.” Another long pause. “We walked around the island.” Jag let the next pause get longer and longer.
Josie looked straight at him. “Should have taken a picnic lunch. It was a fine day. There are some nice places in the island where a couple can have a sandwich and look across the bay to the town, or out to the lake.” This time it was Josie who waited.
“Well, yes, we did have a picnic lunch, as a matter of fact.”
Josie looked out the glass door to the stairs that led to the street. “When I was young, it wasn’t all that uncommon for young couples to go to the island for picnics. There's a couple of picnic spots further from the shore, where the view isn't much, unless you like a lot of pink in your view."
"You sound like you know a fair amount about this place. Did you take sandwiches on your picnics to the island?"
"Maybe I just know these things by rumour. How was the view?" She waited a second, watching him. "Ah. Well, then." She smiled. "There are going to be a few disappointed women around Brighton to find you're in a relationship with a passing stranger."
Ally Oop Through the Ulysses Trees Page 10
