“I’m not in this for the money.”
“Is anyone else home?” Emma asked, changing the subject.
“That’s none of your business.”
“Fine. But back to the money. Even if you’re not in this for the money, other people are. And if someone is going to make money off your name, it might as well be us, right?”
“Us?” Dan said.
Emma’s face strained in thought. “I don’t want to fight,” she eventually said. “Here’s my card. I’m staying at the Gravesen. I’ll be there until you change your mind.”
Dan took the card to be polite. “I hope you didn’t pack too light,” he said.
Emma laughed. “Goodnight, Dan McCarthy.”
“Bye.”
“Hold on,” she called as Dan started to close the door. “If we do end up working together, I need to know that you won’t back down.”
“We won’t be working together.”
Emma continued as though Dan hadn’t spoken. “What I mean is: can you take the heat? Or are you going to crack and say you made it all up?”
“I didn’t make anything up.”
“Good,” Emma said. She winked.
“No, seriously. I’m telling the truth.”
“Yeah… say it like that. And do that face. Perfect.”
“I didn’t make it up,” Dan repeated, quickly losing patience.
Emma kept nodding. “Just like that. Game face.” She started to walk down the driveway.
“I’m telling the truth!” Dan called after her.
Emma turned round, pointing her finger at Dan and smiling. “Keep something in the tank, Dan McCarthy. We’re just getting started.”
Dan stood in the doorway wondering what had just happened. There was something about Emma that was just… exhausting. She had an intensity that Dan couldn’t place, and at the end of a long day he was glad to be rid of it.
He locked the door, tossed her business card on the floor, and went straight to bed.
D minus 85
10 Downing Street
London, England
Long past midnight in London, Prime Minister William Godfrey’s eyes remained glued to his television. Unlike in the United States, he was the main story here.
Both of the UK’s 24-hour news channels had been talking about Saturday’s protest march all day, only occasionally stopping to replay Godfrey’s humiliating incident from Friday morning.
Godfrey watched as though looking at a car crash, unable to tear his eyes away despite the unpleasantness of the sight. He sat alone in the harsh light of the screen as the kind of Z-list talking heads who were called upon at 3am lined up to kick him while he was down; as studio guests made their gleeful predictions for the protest’s turnout; as unprofessional newsreaders hardly even tried to hide their amusement at the humiliating images from Friday and the security breach that had enabled them in the first place.
It had been like this all day and all night. Snippets about the theft at the IDA and Richard Walker’s ill-judged remarks about China aired for a few minutes every hour, but the backlash against Godfrey’s recent moves to begin a sweeping privatisation of the National Health Service remained the overwhelming focus of the British media.
Not a day went by when Godfrey didn’t long for the easy out his American colleagues had on the issue of healthcare; he would have given anything to operate in a political landscape in which all it took to disarm anyone who got too protective of their free health care was to shout “communists!” and wax lyrical about the wonders of the free market.
“When we’re looking at pictures like this,” a jumped up student leader told the chair of the late-night discussion panel, “when the police are expecting a turnout in the millions, and when the country is bracing itself for a wave of general strikes, how can anyone sit there and tell us with a straight face that Godfrey’s position is at all tenable?”
Godfrey hated it all. He hated the picture on the screen and he hated the layabout student politician commenting on it, but what he hated more than anything else was the lack of respect shown in referring to him as “Godfrey”. His PR team had succeeded in replacing “William Godfrey” or “the Prime Minister” with the grander-sounding “Prime Minister Godfrey” as the standard term used by British media personnel, and he knew that this privately educated student leader understood as well as anyone that surnames were for subordinates.
Though the semantics of the name issue may have seemed trivial to anyone else, Godfrey considered it symptomatic of a society full of over-privileged and under-worked brats. Wherever he looked, he saw people who demanded to be heard but had nothing to say. But while Godfrey had made a career out of refusing to pander to empty vessels, even he privately conceded that he had bitten off more than he could chew with the fast-tracked health proposals.
While he would never say it publicly, Godfrey knew he had made a mistake. He had of course known that emotions about healthcare ran high, but he hadn’t quite appreciated how high.
What William Godfrey wouldn’t even speak aloud to his most trusted advisors was that he wanted a way out; a way to back out without being seen to back down. But Godfrey had nailed his colours to the mast and left no room for manoeuvre, so finding such a way out at this late stage seemed beyond unlikely.
At half past the hour, when one of the British news channels cut to ads and the other was busy reviewing Friday’s tennis results, Godfrey flicked to Blitz News for a few refreshing minutes of hearing about problems that weren’t his.
Godfrey’s eyes were met with a face he didn’t recognise: a young man named Dan McCarthy. He shuffled in his seat and turned up the volume.
The Blitz News half-hourly bulletin spoke at length about this Dan McCarthy character and the documents he had posted online hours earlier. Godfrey had been briefed on the so-called IDA leak when the story first broke and had seen a few brief snippets here and there, but he had no idea that it had gained such momentum in the meantime. During this five-minute bulletin, the China issue — an international powder-keg which was patently more newsworthy than this nonsense about aliens — was mentioned precisely zero times.
Godfrey shook his head and smirked. It was genius.
President Slater deserved credit if she had put Richard Walker up to it, but Godfrey doubted she could have been so farsighted. Richard, on the other hand, was a man Godfrey had long admired and whose once-upon-a-time presidential campaign he had openly supported.
Unsurprisingly to Godfrey, Richard’s party had tossed him aside in favour of a more presentable candidate and since left him to waste his potential on the three-decade vanity project that was the IDA. In an age where every utterance was combed through by the professionally offended, Godfrey understood why there was no room in frontline politics for an idiosyncratic figure like Richard Walker.
But if the media fervour over Dan McCarthy proved one thing in Godfrey’s mind, it was that Richard still had the touch.
Richard had been around long enough to know that politics was more magic than science, and he had been around long enough to perfect the magician’s most important trick of all: diversion.
Godfrey could think of absolutely nothing more capable of capturing the public’s imagination and attention better than the idea of the American government suppressing evidence of extraterrestrial life.
It was the time-tested plot of a dozen movies and a hundred books, and as William Godfrey prepared for the most testing day of his political life, it gave him an idea.
He tiptoed through to his bedroom, careful not to wake his wife. The only reason Godfrey opted to sleep at all was to avoid total wipeout; he had slept for no more than four of the last 48 hours and had a hellacious day ahead of him, so he knew it was necessary to get whatever sleep he could before following through on his idea.
Godfrey looked at the time — 3:41 — and sighed. He lay down. After a few seconds, he rolled over and adjusted his alarm from 5:45 to 5:00.
Exhausted or not
, he had a speech to write.
D minus 84
McCarthy Residence
Birchwood, Colorado
In the early hours of Saturday morning, while floating somewhere between sleep and consciousness, Dan McCarthy was startled upright by a loud bang.
Dan walked to the front window and looked outside, where the noise seemed to have come from. He saw three news vans parked across the street. A sliding door slammed on the gaudily painted Blitz News vehicle, making the same bang as before. Dan didn’t know how long any of the news vans had been there, but the Blitz News crew were the only people to have exited their vehicle. Even as the Blitz News cameraman set up a mobile lighting rig and the presenter obsessively fixed his hair in the car’s side mirror, the other news crews remained inside their respective vans.
Dan recognised the ACN logo on one of the occupied vans — it stood for Action Central News, perhaps the closest thing Blitz News had to a viable challenger — but he had never heard of the name on the third van. All he could make out from his angle was “Blue Dish Ne”, which obviously had to be Blue Dish News.
The cameraman switched his light on, sending an impossibly powerful beam straight towards Dan’s window. It was like a car aiming its headlights straight towards him, so he instinctively turned away to protect his eyes.
Dan walked away from the window. Clark would have told him to ignore the light and wait for them to film their stupid segment, no doubt about it, so that was what he did.
Before he could even turn on the TV to see what they were going to say about him, Dan heard another noise outside, this time even louder. But rather than a bang, this was a voice. An angry voice.
Dan looked outside again and saw his neighbour remonstrating with the two men from Blitz News about the stupidly bright light they were shining on a quiet street in the middle of the night. The Blitz News crew paid no attention to him. Dan’s neighbour, Mr Byrd, briefly said something to the people in the other vans. They opened their windows to talk and seemed to be on his side of the argument.
The three vans were parked right outside Mr Byrd’s house. But rather than go back inside, he crossed the street towards Dan’s.
Dan unlocked his door and opened it slightly to let Mr Byrd inside without revealing himself to the cameraman.
“Since when did you have paparazzi?” Mr Byrd said, trying to inject some humour into the situation. He offered Dan his hand to shake, as was his way. Mr Byrd, long retired, had lived across the street since before Dan was born. He looked younger than his 66 years and had really stepped up to help out with things that Dan couldn’t handle on his own after his father's accident.
“I didn’t mean for any of this to happen,” Dan said. “I tried to do it anonymously, and I’ve been keeping my head down all day. This isn’t what I wanted.”
Mr Byrd had known Dan for a long time. He had seen Dan reluctantly posing for photographs on the doorstep before his first day of school; he had seen Dan wrapped up in a sleeping bag, huddling beside a barrel fire, fighting to stay awake for a midnight meteor shower in the middle of winter; and he had seen Dan trying to tell Clark what happened in the aftermath of their father’s accident. But in more than twenty years, he had never seen Dan look as helpless as he looked right now.
“I know, son,” Mr Byrd said, pulling Dan in to pat him on the back. “So do you want me to call the boys at the station? There has to be a public nuisance law about this kind of thing.”
Dan shook his head; the last thing he wanted to do was make a bigger scene. “Let me try Clark first.”
Mr Byrd encouraged him to give it a shot.
Clark’s phone rang and rang but eventually went to voicemail. Whatever was about to happen would be over by the time Clark got the message, so Dan decided there was no point in worrying him with it.
“Oh, great,” Mr Byrd said from the window, where he stood peering out at the news vans. “Old Mrs Naylor is out giving them a piece of her mind. We’re going to have to do something, son.”
“Clark didn’t pick up,” Dan said.
Mr Byrd turned to face him. “Call the boys?”
“Give me one more minute,” Dan said. He searched frantically for the business card he had tossed on the ground a few hours earlier. He found it in the shadow of the couch and dialled the number.
* * *
“This is Emma Ford,” the voice on the other end of the line said, nowhere near as chirpy as it had been earlier.
“I know. This is—”
“Dan McCarthy!” Emma said. “The only man I don’t mind being woken up by at 2am.” Dan could almost hear the smile on her face.
“There are news people outside my house with a really bright light,” he said, wasting no time on niceties, “and they’re waking up all of my neighbours and I don’t want to have to get the police.”
“Yeah, you definitely don’t want to do that. Will I come over there and get rid of them?”
Dan hesitated, still cautious of striking up any kind of formal relationship with a PR firm. “Uh, I was hoping that maybe you could just tell me what to do?”
“Okay,” Emma said, not sounding too affronted. “First of all, do they definitely know you’re home?”
“Yeah.”
“So I guess now you understand that keeping a low profile really isn’t an option.”
“Can you just help me to get rid of them?” Dan said, impatience turning to frustration.
“Okay, okay. Would you be okay with talking to them tomorrow? Just the ones that are outside?”
“I don’t want to talk to anyone,” Dan said. Guard up, mouth shut.
“I’ll tell you exactly what to say. I can maybe even say it for you, as long as you’re there. And we’ll do it on your terms, wherever you want. It’s either this or that; their terms or ours.”
Dan looked over at Mr Byrd, who was still shaking his head as he watched the events transpiring in their normally peaceful community.
“So how do I get rid of them?” Dan asked.
“You’ll talk to them tomorrow?”
“Fine, whatever. Just tell me what to do tonight.”
“Okay, here’s what you’re going to do: you’re going to go outside and tell them that if they leave now, they can have a world exclusive statement at 5:40.”
“Why 5:40?” Dan asked. It struck him as a strangely random time.
“The breakfast cycle starts at 6.”
A few seconds of silence passed as Dan realised that Emma meant 5:40 in the morning. He barely even knew there was a 5:40 in the morning.
“What about 8:40?” he suggested.
“6am here is 8am in New York. That’s the latest we can go. It’s just a one-time thing.”
Dan hesitated again. “Maybe this isn’t such a good idea. There must be another way?”
“Not really,” Emma said. “It’s quid pro quo. Those guys outside aren’t running a charity. They don’t want to be outside some guy’s house at this time of night any more than you want them to be there.”
Dan sighed and held the phone against his chest. “Mr Byrd,” he said. “Can you give them a message for me?”
“Sure thing.”
“Thanks. Could you tell them that I’m not talking to them in the middle of the night or the middle of the street, but that if they leave now and don’t come back, I’ll talk to them at 5:40 down at the old drive-in. Say it’s a world exclusive. Do you want me to write that down?”
Mr Byrd shook his head. “No problem. Consider it done.” He went outside.
“Who’s Mr Byrd?” Emma asked. “Have you signed with someone else?”
“He’s my neighbour.”
“Oh. Okay. So is he doing it?”
Dan walked to the window and pulled back the curtain. “Looks like it.”
“Which vans are there, anyway?”
“Blitz, ACN, and I think the other one says Blue Dish News.”
“Blue Dish Network? That’s not a station. They just beam clean feeds to
other outlets. They’re pretty small fry. ACN in Colorado is probably Maria Janzyck, but Blitz could be anyone. I’m guessing it’s not Maria and her team who are shining the light?”
“It’s Blitz,” Dan said.
“Figures.”
“Hold on, he’s coming back.” Dan held the phone to his chest again and greeted Mr Byrd at the door. “How did it go?”
“They’re leaving. Do you want me to come with you to the old drive-in? The media can be snakes, son.”
“It’s okay, Mr Byrd. I appreciate the offer, but someone from a PR firm is going to be doing the talking for me, anyway.”
Mr Byrd nodded slowly, like he wasn’t too hot on the idea of PR sharks sniffing around but knew that Dan needed someone on his side with expertise in this kind of thing.
“I’ll be careful,” Dan said, sensing the concern.
“Okay, well, you should get some sleep.” Mr Byrd stopped at the door. “And listen, Dan: I know you too well to think you’re making all of this up. But I don’t want to see them chew you up and spit you out. Does any part of you think that this whole folder thing could be someone’s idea of a joke?”
“Goodnight, Mr Byrd,” Dan said.
Mr Byrd took the hint and left. The ACN and Blue Dish vans were already gone, and the Blitz News light was out.
Dan stepped back inside without showing himself and put the phone back to his ear. “Are you still there?”
“Yup,” Emma said. “But he’s right: you better get yourself some beauty sleep. These Ultra HD cameras can be pretty rough.”
“You’re doing the talking though, right?”
“We’ll iron out the details when I come over,” Emma dodged. “Will we say 5:15?”
“I guess.”
“Great. See you at 5, Dan McCarthy.”
“I thought we said 5:15?” Dan protested, but the line was dead.
He shook his head and locked the door.
SATURDAY
Not Alone Page 7
