Not Alone

by Falconer, Craig A.

  Sarah tried to interject: “But one point that we should remem—”

  “And that’s the beauty of this leak,” Billy continued, unfazed. “For the first time, we have official-looking documents that are as verifiable as they are falsifiable. I don’t want to hear any more from Richard Walker; I want to hear from Argentina and Austria, and I want to hear from these Australian treasure hunters.”

  “But don’t you think it’s a little suspicious that these documents are all printed or handwritten?” Sarah asked, repeating the lines she was being fed. “If we were dealing with a digital leak — something like a stolen hard drive or a hacked email account — then we would have metadata and creation dates. There would be a trail of evidence across different government systems. In short, the letters would have provenance.”

  “It’s a fair point,” Billy conceded. “But Walker has spoken out against the inherent risk of trusting digital systems more than once. You know that as well as I do. Besides, the two government replies are from the late ’80s, and you’d have to be extremely naïve to believe that all sensitive mail gets scanned on receipt.”

  Sarah hesitated. “If you can bear with us for one second, Billy, I believe we have a positive ID on Dan McCarthy.”

  An image of Dan appeared on the left of the screen. From his couch at home, he shook his head in disbelief. He had known it was coming, but that didn’t make it any easier.

  “Is that him?” Billy asked, walking to the wrong side of the camera and looking at the cameraman’s feed. “Definitely?”

  “We’re being told yes,” Sarah said, still trying to relay what she was told while listening for the next part. “Based on the name and Richard Walker’s description of a 6'3" part-time barista from Colorado. In fact, this has now been confirmed by our colleagues at Blitz Digest, where Mr McCarthy has written in the past, as Richard Walker said.”

  On the screen, Billy saw a young man with unkempt curly hair and square-framed glasses that looked a size too small. Billy didn’t usually judge books by their covers, but Dan McCarthy didn’t look like a self-publicist.

  Billy returned to his position in front of the camera. “I believe him,” he said. “Dan, I mean. Cards on the table: I think this is it.”

  “Really?” Sarah said, only slightly masking her incredulity. “You don’t think the diagnosis of schizophren… uh, schizotypal personality disorder serves to, well, harm his credibil—”

  “No,” Billy interrupted, a flash of anger crossing his face for the first time. “I don’t know what that condition entails and I don’t even know if he really has it. But either way, to stoop so low as to use it as a stick to beat someone with… I didn’t expect that, even from Walker. And I want to make the point that Walker is not just cashing in on the stigma of mental illness — a stigma I’ve felt myself, as you’re probably about to remind everyone — he is in fact actively reinforcing it.”

  Sarah paused. Words like “sensitivity” and “backtrack” came through her earpiece. “Well,” she said, buying a few more seconds, “the thing is… I think Mr Walker mentioned this reluctantly, and only to highlight the fact that we might not be dealing with the most reliable of sources.”

  “But why do we care about the source?” Billy snapped. “I’ve put up with this crap for fifteen years: when they know they can’t deny the claim, they attack the guy who’s making it. What we have to concentrate on is this folder. Everything boils down to the folder, which is either real or it’s not. If it’s not, prove it. Don’t dismiss it; address it. Talk to Argentina, talk to Austria, talk about Kloster. Or how about Walker talks to me? Let’s see how his lies hold up when he’s not reading from a script and you’re not soft-balling him easy questions. We don’t have to keep talking about the kid. He’s done his part.”

  As instructed, Sarah homed in on Dan. “Come on now, Billy,” she said condescendingly. “If someone is prepared to make these kinds of claims, then they have to expect scrutiny. And if Dan McCarthy is going to stick to his story, he’s going to have to get used to being questioned.”

  “Oh, I’m sure you’ll see to that,” Billy said. “Don’t think I’ve forgotten about the intimidation and harras—”

  “I’m sorry, Billy,” Sarah interjected urgently. “We’ve run out of time.”

  “Of course we have.”

  “Would you like to give out any information on tickets for your little show tonight?” Sarah asked, abandoning all efforts to hide the derision in her voice.

  “Don’t do that,” Billy said. “You know I’m not here to promote.” He then briefly turned to face the arena behind him before looking back at the camera. “And hey, if you did your research then you’d also know I sold this place out weeks ago.”

  “Is there anything else you’d like to say to our viewers?” Sarah asked, parroting the line through gritted teeth.

  “Yeah,” Billy grinned, unclipping the microphone from his collar. “Change the channel.”

  “Billy Kendrick,” Sarah said as she and her co-hosts returned to the screen. “Such a shame there’s no one else like him.”

  D minus 89

  McCarthy Residence

  Birchwood, Colorado

  Dan’s laptop and phone were chiming and ringing and buzzing like an orchestra as a tsunami of notification alerts gained pace by the second. His name used to be mentioned around once per week when someone — usually a bot — commented on one of his articles. But now that he had been identified as the source of the leak and his sparse social media accounts had been located, it was more like once per heartbeat.

  He disabled all notifications as quickly as he could and fell back onto his couch. Though immensely grateful for the way Billy defended him, Dan couldn’t help but wish that Billy had more decisively steered the conversation away from Dan and the personality disorder that he didn’t even have.

  Richard’s chosen phrase — “clinically diagnosed” — was a blatant misrepresentation of the truth. Three years earlier, when Dan reluctantly accepted his father’s well-meaning assertion that it was time to see someone, a local doctor had indeed identified STPD as a possibility. But fewer than a third of the symptoms were decisively present, and both Dan and his father agreed that the doctor’s conclusion came from an over-reliance on a glorified flowchart of ridiculously loaded questions.

  When they sought a second opinion, the psychiatrist in Denver agreed with the McCarthys without qualification. Her confident diagnosis of a mild anxiety disorder — which she described as “half a world away” from the first opinion — was more along the lines of what they had expected. Dan’s older brother Clark still didn’t agree there was anything “wrong” with Dan at all, but Dan didn’t let any of it bother him and quietly took the pills. There was no denying that they made his life easier.

  Dan hadn’t even heard the word schizotypal since then until Richard Walker used it as a thinly veiled slur. He had no idea how Richard could have found out about the initial misdiagnosis given that it was never officially recorded.

  Dan’s phone chimed and vibrated again. He reached out to shut it up but stopped when he realised that it was the tone for an incoming voice call. Dan couldn’t think of any way that a journalist would have found his number, so it had to be someone else. He felt a surge of comfort when he saw the name on the caller ID.

  “Clark,” he answered. “Where are you?”

  “I’m still in Basra. Are you at home?”

  “Yeah. I guess you saw the news?” Dan said, noting the concern in Clark’s voice.

  “Dan, this is serious.”

  “I know. That’s why they’re trying so hard to discredit me. They’ll say anything. Did you hear Richard Walker talking about STPD?”

  Clark was quiet for a few seconds. “You have been taking your pills, right?”

  “The one person in the world I thought I could count on,” Dan sighed, “and you say that?”

  “It’s not like that. I’m not saying you faked it. But what if you’re lik
e the farmer who thinks the crop circles in his field are real, and then a week later someone admits to doing it as a joke?”

  “But I saw the guy who dropped the folder! He literally bumped into me. He spoke. He had a gun.”

  “Did he hurt you?” Clark asked, more worried than before.

  “Well, he knocked me over, but it wasn’t like he was trying to hurt me. He just wanted to get away.”

  “Can you remember everything that happened? Did you see his face? Tell me everything.”

  “I was delivering a book near the IDA building when someone stole everything from Walker’s safe. Ask Mr Wolf, he sent me. He knows I fell, too, but I didn’t tell him the rest. Anyway, the guy who had just stolen everything came out of nowhere and knocked me off my bike. He dropped his stuff then picked all of it up apart from that one folder. It fell the other way from the rest of the stuff, so he didn’t see it. The only other folder I could read said it was about President Slater.”

  Clark sighed through the phone. “And you didn’t think to tell the police any of that? You just decided to put the stuff you found online?”

  “The police are basically the government,” Dan said, like this should have been as obvious to Clark as it was to him. “They would have buried it.”

  Clark didn’t reply.

  “Did you not hear what Billy Kendrick said about Kloster and the U-boats?” Dan continued. “Or what the guy at the press conference said about the handwriting? This is real evidence. Billy said this is really it.”

  “Billy Kendrick, Dan. The guy’s a nutcase.”

  “When will you be home?” Dan asked, deciding there was no sense in arguing with Clark since he was one of the many who would only accept the truth when it could no longer be feasibly denied.

  “I’m trying to switch some things around. Next Sunday at the latest.”

  “Nine days?”

  “I’m supposed to be here for another three weeks,” Clark said. “I’m only able to get home so soon ’cause I’m calling in a few favours. Do you want me to call Mr Byrd to come over? You could stay with him, or he could stay with you.”

  Dan knew that Clark couldn’t get out of his assignment at the drop of a hat, even though his private security work offered much more leeway than the tours he’d been part of before a respiratory problem ruled him out of active duty. But still, he had hoped for something sooner than nine days.

  “I’ll be fine,” Dan said. “If they wanted to take me in, they wouldn’t have named me first.”

  “I know. I just meant so you’re not on your own while all this is going on.”

  “Seriously, I’ll be fine.”

  “As long as you don’t say anything to anyone. I don’t care how hard they push you to comment… don’t say a word until I’m there, okay? Keep your guard up and your mouth shut. Do you hear me?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Good. I’ll be home as soon as I can. Sunday at the latest. I promise.”

  “Okay. See you later.”

  “Dan, wait.”

  “Yeah?”

  “How’s Dad?”

  Dan paused. “I haven’t been in a while. They said he’s just the same.”

  “Better than worse, I guess.”

  “Yeah,” Dan said flatly.

  “Anyway, like I said: guard up, mouth shut.”

  “Yup.”

  “See you soon,” Clark said, and he hung up.

  * * *

  Curiosity got the better of Dan before he put his phone away, so he looked to see what all of the people mentioning him were saying. About half of it looked to be positive, but the positive comments and posts were the ones with the most activity. The pros were more passionate than the cons, which were mainly one-line dismissals calling Dan a retard or a basement-dwelling virgin.

  Dan had never had to apply the old adage “never read your own press,” but he decided now that it was good advice. He put his phone in his pocket.

  Almost as soon as he did, it rang again.

  “What is it?” he said. “Are you getting home sooner?”

  “Dan McCarthy,” a female voice said; it wasn’t a question, and the voice was high pitched but powerful. “Who was on the line a minute ago?”

  “Who the hell is this?” Dan asked.

  “Emma Ford, XPR.”

  “What?”

  “Xanadu Public Relations,” Emma said. “I know, I know. I didn’t pick the name.” She had a fairly strong southern accent and spoke with what Dan considered an annoyingly chirpy cadence.

  “I’m not going to make any kind of comment,” Dan said. Guard up, mouth shut.

  “No no no, I’m not trying to get you to say anything. My job is to control what other people say. My job is to manage your brand.”

  “Well I’m not a brand, so…”

  “The media are going to talk about you even if they can’t talk to you,” Emma insisted. “You don’t have a choice in that. The choice you have is whether you would rather take control of the agenda or be a passenger in your own life. And let me tell you, I don’t know where this ride is gonna take you unless we grab the wheel right now. What do you say?”

  “Bye,” Dan said.

  “Speak soon,” Emma replied as chirpily as ever.

  Dan turned his phone’s wifi off and put the handset into VIP mode so that it would block all calls that weren’t from either Clark or the hospital.

  Sarah Curtis and the rest of the Blitz News team were still talking about Dan and Billy and Richard Walker, deliberately focusing on the characters rather than the plot. Dan turned the TV off and stood up.

  At lonely times like this he felt glad that their house was so small. Dan never went into his father’s bedroom and had promised to stay out of Clark’s, so there was nowhere else to go but his own.

  He threw himself onto the bed and looked at his aquarium. It was Clark’s aquarium, really, in the sense that Clark had bought it with the first of his danger pay to keep Dan company while he was off earning more, but it had always been in Dan’s room. The cold-water tank, designed for easy maintenance despite its impressive appearance, occupied half of the wall from the door to the corner of Dan’s small room.

  Its most interesting-looking fish, who Dan and Clark had collectively decided was a boy-fish called Skid, had the weirdest looking brown and grey face that either of them had ever seen. Dan often thought that the first person to see one of Skid’s family in the wild must have thought they were looking at an alien.

  But Dan sometimes also wondered how Skid must have felt when he saw his first human, and even more so how the first wild-caught member of Skid’s family must have felt when an alien invader in a diving suit arrived in the lake’s depths, shining a bright light all over the place and thrashing a net around.

  This thought was in Dan’s mind again now, and the events of the day made it more pertinent than usual.

  As Dan thought about the alien fish in the lake being disturbed by the human explorer, he also thought about the alien craft in Austria being destroyed by the human fools.

  The more Dan considered this comparison, though, the less it held up. Weren’t the humans more like the fish whose home was invaded, he wondered?

  Who found who first?

  And who ends up in a tank?

  D minus 88

  Gravesen Hotel

  Paris, France

  Valerie Slater stood by the window of her Presidential Suite on the top floor of the luxurious Gravesen Hotel. She looked absently down to the city below as a steady stream of tourists and locals wandered by, moonlight catching the Seine to complete the picture-perfect scene of Friday night in Paris.

  “So much for blowing over,” she said without prompt, as much to herself as to Jack Neal, the only aide who hadn’t yet been dismissed for the night.

  “I didn’t expect Richard to make a celebrity out of the kid,” Jack said. “I don’t even think Ben Gold knew what Richard was going to say, and he never leaves his side.”

  Pre
sident Slater walked away from the window and sat on the edge of the king-size bed, pushing the mountain of decorative pillows to the floor with her arm in a rare display of frustration. It was bad enough that Richard had gone off-message regarding China, but his ham-fisted attempt to nip the so-called leak story in the bud had been nothing short of disastrous.

  In theory, Slater understood why Richard thought that diverting the domestic media’s attention to a conspiracy theorist whose lies would unravel soon enough might have been preferable to leaving them to focus on the harder-to-solve China problem. But for all the world, she couldn’t understand why he had structured his speech the way he did. If the goal was burying the China talk by focusing on Dan McCarthy, why end with such an incendiary comment about red flags? And if the goal was burying the leak by ending with the flag comment, why devote so much time to Dan McCarthy in the first place?

  No small part of President Slater believed that Richard Walker, a 68-year-old political veteran with a machiavellian streak and very little to lose, simply enjoyed making her life difficult.

  She had agreed to let Richard give the first official reaction to China’s new plans for a lunar colony and Martian visit largely because she was in France and he was the obvious choice. The IDA very rarely had to deal with tangible threats to national security like the one posed by Chinese control of space.

  Richard was popular at home — inexplicably, as far as Slater and the rest of her political generation were concerned — but no one abroad considered him a serious spokesman for the United States. President Slater had hoped that Richard’s inevitably brash response would placate the element of the domestic media that demanded a stronger reply than anyone with real power could responsibly make. It had certainly done that, but Richard went so far that Slater would probably now have to apologise on his behalf; much to the delight of Richard and his cheerleaders, she imagined.