Not Alone

by Falconer, Craig A.

  Even worse, the international headlines about an American cover-up of alien evidence, however far-fetched, were already writing themselves.

  President Slater had woken up with one big problem and was going to bed with two huge ones, both of which had been made worse by Richard’s alleged efforts to contain them.

  Jack Neal walked towards the door, taking President Slater’s sitting down as a sign that their turbulent day was finally over. “Try to get some sleep,” he said.

  “Jack, wait.”

  He stopped and turned his head. “Yeah?”

  “Get me Walker on the line.”

  D minus 87

  Stevenson Farm

  Eastview, Colorado

  Quietly pleased with his performance a few hours earlier, Richard Walker sat in his kitchen with only his 11-year-old cocker spaniel, Rooster, for company.

  As was usual for a Friday night, Richard was enjoying some downtime in his second home, the old cottage where he planned to see out his eventual retirement. Once known locally as Stevenson Farm, this property had been in Richard’s hands for several years since he discreetly purchased it from a hard-up farmer for next to nothing. Richard now spent as many weekends there as he could, equally fond of the isolation and the cornfield vistas. Rooster, too, preferred the cottage to their weekday home in the city.

  Only Ben Gold knew about Richard’s idyllic second home. Ben had been awfully twitchy all day, so Richard was unsurprised to hear his phone ring. It wasn’t the landline, at least; that would have been a real concern.

  “It’s okay, Rooster,” Richard said, calming the easily frightened dog. He picked up his phone without looking at the screen. “What’s bothering you now, Benjamin?”

  “Are you alone?”

  Immediately recognising the voice, Richard grinned. He detected a pronounced weariness in Slater’s tone, which caused his smile to widen further.

  Valerie “goddamn” Slater evoked feelings of despair rather than disdain in Richard. He didn’t hate Slater in a personal sense, he just hated living in a political world where someone like her could be deemed worthy of representing the United States on the world stage.

  When Richard thought of Slater he thought of words like incompetent, misguided, and populist. She was nothing more than an effective career politician; a strong campaigner but a weak leader; a president who lacked both physical stature and political gravitas. To Richard and many others, Slater was embarrassingly outmatched by other world leaders, particularly William Godfrey, the British prime minister who Richard had just been reading about and who he admired for being able to maintain an air of authority even in the middle of his own full-blown domestic crisis.

  Godfrey was among the finest orators Richard had seen in his own lengthy political career; erudite and articulate, he struck Richard as a relic of a bygone era when leaders spoke from the heart instead of an autocue. Though the two men’s paths had never crossed, Richard envied Godfrey’s classical schooling in the lost arts of rhetoric and debate. More than anything else he felt about William Godfrey, though, Richard felt relieved that he hailed from an allied country. Any leader who fell into a verbal spat with Godfrey would likely be humbled, but Richard knew that Slater would be positively eviscerated. The main difference between the two, as far as Richard could tell, was that Slater — like her recent predecessors — made pains to come across as the public’s friend rather than their leader.

  None of Richard’s despair over Slater’s position came from her gender. She was the second female president, and Richard had been as friendly with the first as with any of the incompetent male ones he’d had to put up with over the years. Rather, the core of Richard’s mismatch with Slater was generational; as well as being the second ever female president, Valerie Slater was also the second youngest elected president having entered office at just 42. As Richard dismissively said during Slater’s campaign, she had less life experience than the scar on his cheek.

  All of this made Richard loath to explain himself to Slater, which was surely her reason for calling.

  “I’m a very busy man, Valerie,” he said.

  “Listen, Richard—”

  “Mr Walker,” Richard interrupted.

  President Slater looked at Jack Neal, who encouraged her to keep her cool. She didn’t say anything for a few seconds.

  “What do you want, anyway?” Richard continued, satisfied to have knocked her off track so easily.

  “I don’t like this focus on the individual who posted the files,” Slater said. “What were you trying to achieve with the personal comments?”

  “Do I really have to spell it out for you? It’s not my job to hold your hand and show you how the world works, Valerie. Don’t you have Jack for that?”

  Slater hesitated. She hated him. “Richard, I’m ordering you to refrain from making any further comment about Dan McCarthy. Is that understood?”

  “Anything else?” he said noncommittally.

  “One more thing. How sure are you that Hans Kloster didn’t send letters about underwater exploration to any foreign governments?”

  “What the hell are you talking about? Of course he didn’t. McCarthy wrote those letters on his computer, added some crap about Billy Kendrick, then seized his opportunity to post it all when we had just been robbed. He piggybacked on a real story and it worked. That’s why I had to go after him. People don’t care about the truth these days, they care about the story.”

  “But can’t you see why people might find that a little far-fetched? The idea that he had all of this ready and waiting to post within twenty minutes?”

  “Far-fetched?” Richard scoffed. “Compared to little green men? Hmm? Compared to secret Nazi discoveries? Compared to me covering the whole thing up, right under your nose? Come on, Valerie. Listen to yourself.”

  Jack Neal nodded to President Slater, indicating his feeling that Richard was right.

  “So when do you think this will blow over?” she asked. “Bearing in mind that you won’t be commenting any further.”

  “Three or four days,” Richard said with confidence. “You see, a lot of what I said about McCarthy was the opposite of the truth. He doesn’t really want to be famous. Why else would he have tried to post his fake documents anonymously? That’s not what attention-seekers do. He’ll probably admit his lie before long, and the media will lose interest when they realise there’s nothing to see. I just felt it was better for me to talk about him before they had a chance, so it didn’t seem like we were hiding anything.”

  President Slater had heard enough. She accepted Richard’s reasons for naming Dan McCarthy and didn’t want to give him the satisfaction of a rebuke over his China comments or his overt display of personal disrespect during the press conference. “Fine,” she said. “Just remember not to make any further comment about McCarthy. I’ll be home tomorrow and I’ll take care of this as soon as I land.”

  “What are we going to do about China, anyway?” Richard asked out of nowhere.

  “With the greatest of respect, Mr Walker,” Slater said, sarcastically emphasising his name, “there is no we.” She hung up.

  Richard put his phone down on the table, almost proud of himself for baiting some fight out of Slater.

  He poured a triple shot of whisky and slowly walked towards the kitchen window, looking out at the endless rows of knee-high corn. Rooster followed him and tried to see outside, too.

  “You see those clouds, boy?” Richard said. “Looks like we’re in for a storm.”

  D minus 86

  McCarthy Residence

  Birchwood, Colorado

  After lying in his bedroom for a few hours, Dan heated up a packaged meal and sat down to eat it in front of the TV. He was glad to see that Sarah Curtis and her afternoon co-hosts on Blitz News had been replaced by the evening team.

  Dan caught all but the first few seconds of a recurring feature called Blitz The Deetz, “a rapid breakdown of the hottest topics right now” which was more usef
ul than the cringeworthy name and hollow tagline suggested. The focus of this episode, if you could call it that, was the series of locations named in Dan’s leak.

  Though a little disappointed in the apparent lack of progress in tracking down the senders of any of the three printed replies, Dan paid keen attention to this feature. He hadn’t had time to do much research in the chat booth at the library and the coverage he had seen so far focused almost entirely on him and Billy Kendrick, so a brief rundown sounded good.

  Billy had mentioned a few bits and pieces about “suspicious Nazi activity” at Toplitz and off the Argentine coastline, but Blitz The Deetz provided more details and did so in a surprisingly non-dismissive way. Dan learned from the segment that Lake Toplitz had been the site of Nazi “naval testing” which included powerful detonations deep in the mile-long lake.

  Dan knew nothing whatsoever about New Swabia and was intrigued to hear that it was already a much-discussed topic in conspiracy circles. New Swabia was a region of Antarctica named after the German ship that brought a large crew there in 1939, ostensibly to source whale oil and scout potential locations for naval bases. Many had long speculated about the true motives for the trip, their curiosity piqued by the fact that Germany made no formal territorial claims and established no whaling stations or naval bases in the wake of the expedition.

  Blitz The Deetz continued, telling Dan with the aid of glitzy graphics and sound effects that the German crew who visited New Swabia conducted tests around Bouvet Island on their way home. Bouvet was another incredibly remote island, measuring six miles on its longest side and lying almost 1000 miles from land in any direction.

  Dan already knew about the even more remote Kerguelen Island, having looked it up when he first found the folder. Continuing with a theme that was becoming unsettlingly clear, Blitz The Deetz revealed that a Nazi crew had visited Kerguelen in 1940.

  The final location was Namtso, a lake in Tibet. By this point there were no prizes for guessing who launched an expedition into Tibet in 1938.

  The next few minutes of Blitz The Deetz touched on Hans Kloster, the scientist who had tried to block underwater exploration at Toplitz and off the coast of Argentina. Dan already knew what Billy had mentioned about Kloster being recruited by the US after the war, but it now emerged that Kloster came from a lauded political family. His grandfather was a turn of the century parliamentarian and, though their father died young, Hans Kloster’s brother Wilhelm went on to become a successful politician in West Germany where he was considered a strong future leadership candidate before his own untimely death in 1988.

  A short but intriguing clip from the time of Hans Kloster’s death in 2007 then played, in which Richard Walker described him as a “woefully under-appreciated father of rocket science” and “one of the most important but for some reason least revered of the German pioneers.”

  Several of Hans Kloster’s newspaper obituaries were displayed, each of which quoted Walker’s immediate description of him as “a titan of science and a patriotic immigrant”. Kloster’s Nazi past received no more than a fleeting mention.

  Finally, the quick-fire rundown briefly discussed Ben Gold, understandably assuming that everyone already knew all about Richard Walker. Ben was a regularly published astrophysicist whose presence at the IDA brought legitimacy in an era when there was no accepted need for space-based weaponry and when there had been no declared progress in the ambitious search for alien signals.

  Well mannered and uncontroversial, Ben was the go-to guy whenever a news network needed a credible talking head for serious stories about runaway comets, newly discovered planets, solar flares and any other celestial issues deemed worthy of a few minutes’ airtime. Most of those who had known Ben at all prior to his appearance at Richard’s press conference remembered him from an incident a few years earlier when he announced the discovery of Kolpin-6b, the most promising candidate planet for advanced life yet detected.

  Ben’s active involvement in the search for alien life made Dan doubt his knowledge of the cover-up. If not simply blinded by trust in his longtime colleague, Dan expected that Ben was perhaps putting on a united front in public while grilling Richard behind closed doors.

  When Blitz The Deetz ended, an infographic with the title “STPD — myth vs fact” filled the screen. It proclaimed that, “where present, hallucinations and psychoses are likely to be briefer and less pronounced than in schizophrenic patients.”

  Dan didn’t think many viewers would care for such nuance, and he knew that being dissociated from schizophrenia merely by degree could be fatal for his credibility. There was nothing he could do, though, so he rose again from the couch, muted the TV, and elected to do the only productive thing he could think of.

  With a new-found determination, Dan fetched the folder from under his bed and lifted out the unreadable German letter. All of the talk about wartime activity led Dan to think that this letter might be from the 1940s. It would almost explain the stupid writing, he thought.

  With that in mind he ran each of the letter’s pages through his scanner and looked at the images on his computer, zoomed to a size that helped him identify some of the calligraphic touches as particular letters. The first complete word Dan found — aided initially by the umlaut — was, ominously, Führer. He then successfully identified a few more words from the first page, becoming quite good at spotting instances of “ein” and “eine”. Further progress was hard to come by, though, and Dan soon couldn’t help but feel like he was running through treacle; getting nowhere despite applying himself totally.

  Dan looked at the time in the top corner of his computer’s screen and did a double take when he saw that more than 90 minutes had passed since he turned it on. He saved his annotated progress and decided to call it a night.

  The computer chimed as it powered off, which struck Dan as odd, but he shrugged it off. As he walked to turn off the TV — now replaying Billy Kendrick’s tenacious interview from immediately after Richard’s press conference — Dan heard the chime again.

  Doorbell, he realised.

  Dan stayed still. In the unlikely event that Mr Byrd had come to check on him this late, he would say so. He usually called through the door.

  No voice came.

  After a long gap that left Dan thinking that the caller had gone, he heard three rushed knocks on the window.

  “Dan McCarthy,” the visitor shouted at the glass. The high-pitched voice sounded vaguely familiar but was heavily muffled by the window.

  Beginning to realise that the visitor wasn’t going away any time soon, Dan walked towards the door. When he got there he heard footsteps on the other side, and then someone lowering themselves to the ground.

  “Dan McCarthy!” a chirpy voice called through the gap at the bottom of his door. He recognised it now.

  After a few seconds, Dan opened the door and saw a smartly dressed young woman crouched to the ground with her head on his doormat. She jumped to her feet, smiling warmly.

  “Dan McCarthy,” she said, holding out her hand. “Emma Ford. From the phone, remember?”

  * * *

  “Why do you keep saying my whole name?” Dan asked.

  “Dan McCarthy is the name on everyone’s lips,” Emma said, “and I’m going to make sure it stays there. So can I come in, or are we gonna stand out here all night?”

  Dan shook his head. “Neither.”

  “Please? I really need a coffee. I had to fly normal class, and I hate flying anyway.”

  “You flew here?” Dan said, genuinely amazed. “Where from?”

  “Vegas.”

  “You came all the way from Vegas since we spoke on the phone?”

  Emma nodded. “Two-hour flight. See, I was at the airport when I called, because I was supposed to be going home tonight. I’ve been working in Vegas since Sunday and this was my weekend off until you came up. Not that I’m complaining,” she smiled. “This is big.”

  “Where’s home?” Dan asked, not knowing wh
ere else to start.

  “Well, I’m from Georgia, but home is New York.”

  “That’s a long way from Birchwood.”

  “What can I say? I go where the action is. But speaking of Birchwood… where are all the trees? The name promised trees.”

  “The town is named after a guy whose last name was Birchwood. It’s nothing to do with trees.” Dan shifted uncomfortably in the doorway. “Look, I don’t know if someone told you I would be interested in any of this, but I’m not. I didn’t ask you to fly all this way.”

  “No no no, I know that. And I know it’s late. By the way, you look way more normal than I expected. I was reading about the disease you have and it said—”

  “It’s not a disease,” Dan said. “And I don’t have it.” He didn’t normally make a habit of interrupting people, but Emma brought it out of him.

  “Okay, well, people are saying that you do, so we should probably address that first. It is a strong hook, though, so there might be some merit in letting it sit.”

  Dan didn’t quite know what “letting it sit” meant, but he remembered Clark’s words: guard up, mouth shut. “No one is addressing anything,” he said.

  Emma stared deeply into Dan’s eyes. “Just hear me out, okay? The choice you have is whether you would rather take control of the agenda or be a passen—”

  “No,” Dan said. “I won’t hear you out, because that’s the exact same crap you were trying to sell me over the phone.”

  Emma looked around at the parts of Dan’s house she could see: ripped doormat, streaky windows, peeling paint, a gap at the bottom of the door. The place wasn’t in total disrepair but it certainly didn’t scream wealth.

  “Don’t let this blow over,” she said. “There’s too much money on the table.”