Not Alone

by Falconer, Craig A.

  D minus 83

  10 Downing Street

  London, England

  “I’m not going to say I believe the guy,” William Godfrey explained to a roomful of concerned ministers on Saturday morning. “I’m simply going to issue a call for openness on the matter. Maybe aim a few barbed words at Slater while I’m at it, to give the press something else to talk about.”

  No one said anything. Eyes looked at feet, reluctant to meet Godfrey’s gaze for fear of wordlessly conveying dissent.

  “It’s zero risk,” Godfrey insisted. His confidence of this was unwavering; even though the “special” transatlantic relationship of the early 2000s had been cooling for a decade, the Prime Minister knew that the two countries’ broad cultural overlap and their ever increasing trade links meant that no amount of personal animosity between their leaders could possibly spill over into any kind of hostility. In short, he felt he could say whatever he wanted about President Slater without recourse.

  Finally, someone spoke up. As Godfrey’s Deputy Prime Minister, Diane Logan was theoretically the second most powerful person in the room. Others had been eyeing her tentatively, encouraging her to say something against Godfrey’s planned “call for openness” on the IDA issue. When she did, the message was simple: “Aliens? It’s suicide, William.”

  “As opposed to what?” Godfrey snapped. “Death by a thousand cuts? Death by a million bloody latte-sipping sociology students with nothing better to do than shut down my city for the day?”

  Diane Logan shrugged her shoulders. “Perhaps the last thing you need right now is more enemies.”

  Godfrey counted to five in his head. Embittered by prior experience, he had his own understanding of how the world worked these days, suspecting that any rebuke he gave Diane would quickly find its way into the papers under headlines about “sexist bullying” and whatever other buzzwords the outrage police wanted to pummel him with this week. Godfrey had been burned by that kind of thing before, and it really was the last thing he needed right now.

  “And just think about how you’ll look when they prove it’s a hoax,” Diane tried to reason.

  “Why,” Godfrey said, “because I look so commanding right now?” He picked up the newspapers on his table and threw them down again.

  The front pages all displayed the same picture: William Godfrey standing stunned in the street with red paint splattered all over him. The so-called “blood drones” had been at it for days, attempting to drop water balloons filled with paint on Godfrey whenever he appeared in public. After a few close calls, they finally got him on Friday morning. The low-flying drone’s missile had missed his head — a small consolation, at least — but the balloon landed on his shoulder, splashing flecks of paint onto his face and causing the rest to run down the front of his Italian suit. Too shocked to even rub the paint away from his eyes, Godfrey stood dumbly for several seconds as media flashbulbs went off to capture the image and a million internet posts went out to share it.

  The blood drones were intended to be a protest about the health reforms, with the red paint symbolising the blood of the future victims of privatisation. As far as Godfrey was concerned, however, the populist media’s jovial reaction to a physical attack on the nations’s elected leader summed up everything that was wrong with the modern world.

  The blood drones had returned overnight, leaving a message right in front of Godfrey’s window. The message amounted to a coarse winking face: three balloons had been dropped in a vertical line for one eye, three in a horizontal line for the other, and eight more for the curved-line smile. These fourteen paint bombs presented the most flagrant and worrying breach of Downing Street’s security in Godfrey’s memory, but no one seemed to care. The fervour against his drive for “health efficiency”, which he insisted was largely manufactured by the “antagonistic leftist press”, apparently rendered him a fair target for the blood-drone piloting vandals.

  “I think it’s a great idea,” a confident voice said from the side of the table. The voice belonged to John Cole, Godfrey’s highly controversial Immigration Minister. Cole’s BNU party — British Nationals United — had won a game-changing 24 seats at the last election and propped up Godfrey’s Conservatives in a flimsy coalition.

  Although originally formed as a single-issue party to tackle what Cole saw as an unchecked migrant invasion, the BNU soon opted to present itself as the true representative of Britain’s working poor. Those working class voters knew that they would find themselves more affected by health privatisation than anyone else, causing many BNU supporters to feel utterly betrayed by John Cole’s vocal support of Godfrey’s plans.

  Cole insisted that compromise was necessary and claimed the recent ruthless crackdown on non-EU migrants as a victory for his party. But with Cole’s true colours having been revealed by his decision to choose a cosy cabinet position over keeping his electoral promises, most of the voters who had bought into his slickly worded vision of “a fairer Britain for working Britons” now regretted falling for the spin.

  “At least someone sees sense,” Godfrey said. He liked Cole, even though thousands of the protesters already descending on London were BNU members coming down from the party’s northern base. Godfrey was far more perturbed by the thirteen slimeball MPs from his own party who had announced overnight that they would be participating in the protest march. He could only hope that they would be stupid enough to try to mingle with the masses.

  “It’s a mistake,” Diane Logan insisted.

  “John,” Godfrey said, looking straight into Diane’s eye as spoke. “How would you like to stand beside me when I make the speech?”

  “I would like that very much, sir,” John Cole said, like the opportunistic sycophant he was.

  Godfrey smiled at Diane. “Excellent. Everyone else can leave.”

  As the room emptied, John Cole walked over to the Prime Minister. “How hard are you planning to go at Slater?” he asked.

  “Hard,” Godfrey replied.

  An intense look filled Cole’s eyes. “You hard, or me hard? Because if we’re going to do this, we might as well go for it.”

  Godfrey couldn’t help but grin. John Cole was a weasel, a chameleon, and a snake. Hell, he was every animal in the damn zoo. But what Godfrey admired most about Cole was his undying ability to generate controversy. For while Godfrey had spent the last few years quietly lamenting the rise of hyper political correctness, Cole had been busy defining himself in opposition to it, steering into the skid all the way to the House of Commons.

  Put simply, John Cole’s uncanny knack for provoking controversy was the reason that this overweight white-van man from Sheffield was now advising the Prime Minister on what could prove to be the most important speech of his reign.

  Godfrey leaned towards him. “I’m listening.”

  D minus 82

  McCarthy Residence

  Birchwood, Colorado

  At 4:58, two minutes before Dan’s alarm was set to rouse his motionless but awake body to life, a ruckus outside beat it to the punch.

  What now?, he thought.

  Dan heard Emma’s voice as soon as he opened his bedroom door. She was outside, arguing with someone on the phone, as far as Dan could tell.

  “I’ll make the call,” Emma said forcefully, the intensity in her voice rising more than the volume. “Don’t think I won’t.”

  Dan opened the door just in time to see a Blitz News van driving away.

  “Fucking parasites,” Emma said, turning to face him.

  Dan flinched at Emma’s language, which didn’t seem congruent with her soft southern accent and the sugar-sweet appearance she cultivated. He also found more than a hint of irony in a PR rep taking such a stance against the media, but noted that Emma seemed genuinely enraged by something. “What’s going on?” he asked.

  Emma walked inside for the first time. “You haven’t seen it?”

  “Seen what?”

  She sighed. “Blitz Online. It’s probably b
etter if you don’t look.”

  Dan immediately walked towards his computer.

  “We don’t have time for that,” Emma said, stepping in front of him. She took her phone from her pocket and navigated to the story. “Basically, they published a story about you and your family, with pictures of you and your neighbour from last night. That guy Mr Byrd. And I just found them back here again, taking photos of the inside of your car.”

  Dan looked at Emma’s phone and saw a picture from the night before of him peeking out of his window. He scrolled down. Sure enough, the next picture was a clearer image of Mr Byrd.

  This picture was the first Emma had seen of Mr Byrd. Instead of the older-looking gentleman with thin grey hair she had expected, she saw a well-built man with short reddish curls and a firm expression. “Some moustache, huh?” she said. “They sure as hell don’t make them like that anymore!”

  “Are Blitz doing this because we told them to leave?” Dan asked, for once more focused than Emma.

  She shook her head. “No. Well, maybe. But I don’t think they could have researched and written it all so quickly. It went up less than ten minutes after their van left.”

  Dan took the phone to see exactly what Blitz News had “researched and written” about him. A lot of it had no basis in fact, and the parts that did were heavily distorted. The article’s unnamed author described Mr Byrd as Dan’s “surrogate guardian” — a huge stretch in itself — who had to play such a role because Dan’s mother “abandoned him as a child” and his father “was critically injured in an accident and remains in a coma.”

  “He’s not in a coma,” Dan said, tellingly ignoring the other part. “He came out of it two weeks ago. So much for doing their research.”

  Emma didn’t say anything. Dan kept reading. Though he didn’t appreciate the general insinuation that he needed someone around to take care of him, Dan took most exception to Blitz Online’s comments on why Clark couldn’t do the job.

  “My brother is not a mercenary,” he said angrily, as though Emma was the one who wrote the article. “He had to go into private security. He got sick. And he would be here if we didn’t need the money.”

  “They have a narrative they want to get across,” Emma said. “If the facts don’t fit, the facts change.”

  The article’s conclusion made the incredible jump that Dan had created a vast conspiracy to combat his loneliness. The final line of baseless psychobabble said that Dan’s actions fell “within the broad expectations of schizotypal personality disorder, a condition which McCarthy, like many other sufferers, stubbornly insists he does not have.”

  Dan took his eyes from the phone and looked at Emma. “Did you have something to do with this?” he asked, laying his suspicions right out there.

  “Of course not,” Emma said, taken aback. “Are you talking about… because they’re saying you said you don’t have the disease? You think I told them that?”

  “How else would they know?” Dan asked, too focused to bother reiterating that the thing he didn’t even have was a disorder rather than a disease.

  “How am I supposed to know how they know?” Emma fired back. “How did Richard Walker know anything about it in the first place? It must be on your record or something. And if Walker can get to it, so can Blitz. Trust me on that.”

  Dan considered this.

  “Look,” Emma said, “if this thing is going to work for either of us, you have to believe me.”

  “You don’t do irony, do you?”

  Emma’s face gave nothing away. “I know you probably think PR is a shady world full of liars and charlatans, and that I’m going to tell you what you want to hear. And guess what? All of that is probably true. But you have to think of me as being like a lawyer. I might lie, but not to my client. If I’m lying, I’m lying for my client. I’m lying with my client.”

  Dan didn’t have the energy to dispute his position as Emma’s client, but he couldn’t let the other point slide. “I’m not lying,” he said. “So if you’re lying, you’re lying to me. And you say I have to believe you — right? — but you don’t believe me. So why should I believe you?”

  Emma didn’t respond. Helpless was too strong a word, but she looked far more beleaguered than Dan had seen her so far, even through the immaculate facade of perfect hair and makeup that he found begrudgingly impressive for this time in the morning.

  “Okay,” she eventually said. “Look me in the eyes and tell me that you found that folder with everything in it and that you didn’t make any of it up.”

  “It’s 100% true,” Dan confirmed. “If I was lying, you would be able to tell.”

  Ordinarily Emma would have taken such a comment as an attempt at flattery; a classic application of the “appeal to ego” tactic that was so central to what she did in her daily work. But something about Dan’s expression seemed unusually uncomplicated, like he really did believe what he was saying.

  “And there’s no way that the folder could be someone else’s idea of a joke?” Emma asked.

  Dan sighed, fed up of hearing that stupid line. “I saw the guy who dropped it. He had Walker’s gold bars and everything.”

  Satisfied that she had enough plausible deniability to do her job well, Emma sent Dan to get ready for their brief press statement. “Wear something smart,” was her only instruction. Dan went into his bedroom to follow it.

  Emma took the opportunity to perform a quick survey of Dan’s house. After the way Richard Walker painted Dan in his press conference, she had half-expected to find a dimly lit bedsit with newspaper clippings about aliens all over the walls and pizza boxes strewn across the floor. The house wasn’t much larger than she had imagined, but the similarities ended there.

  Although Dan’s TV looked around ten years old, the glass unit it stood on was spotless. The rest of the living area was small but uncluttered, and the floor — which looked like real wood — was so polished that it gleamed.

  “You keep this place pretty clean,” Emma said through Dan’s door.

  “The cleaners do that,” he replied.

  Emma walked towards the kitchen, exercising her eye for detail as she went. Although the place was clean and tidy, there were still clear signs that money was tight, as she had inferred from the outside when she first arrived. There was a caterpillar-shaped draught excluder beside the front door, for one thing, indicating that the small gap at the bottom wasn’t a new problem. The kitchen door didn’t have a working handle, either, and the lightbulb on the ceiling was exposed.

  “Can I have a drink?” she called to Dan, looking for an excuse to nose around in the cupboards and refrigerator.

  “Yeah.”

  Emma opened the fridge and found three neat rows of packaged meals, all in identical narrow trays with a sticky label on the cellophane. The labels were all branded with the same logo: Houghton’s Home Fresh. Emma had seen ads for Houghton’s before so knew these were the kind of meals that were delivered by the company each week. The service didn’t come cheap. She took a glass bottle of expensive looking lemonade — again, Houghton’s Home Fresh — and went back through to wait for Dan.

  “I’ll be a few more minutes,” he said, hearing the bottle fizz as Emma opened it right outside his door.

  Next to the door, she noticed a framed cheque for $85 made out to Dan. “What’s with the cheque?” she asked.

  “That was for the first article I ever sold. The one about Lake Vostok that Richard Walker sort of mentioned. I never cashed it.”

  “Why?”

  “Because the cheque is worth more to me than the $85 I could swap it for.”

  Emma didn’t reply for a few seconds. She was getting a sense now that what Dan had said the previous night about not being in it for the money was more than a platitude. “Have you never needed the $85?” she eventually asked.

  “Loads of times, just never enough to actually use it.”

  “So how can you afford the cleaner and all of the fancy food?”

&nbs
p; “Clark pays for that stuff. With him in Iraq and my dad in the hospital, he wanted to make sure I eat right and that the place won’t be a wreck when he gets back.”

  “Does he make good money?” Emma asked, talking more quietly now that she was right beside the thin bedroom door.

  “Not good money,” Dan said. “Crazy money. That’s why he’s out there. But listen, I’ll be ready a lot quicker if you could just give me a few minutes.”

  “Sure.”

  Ten seconds later, the chime of a text message notification filled the air. Dan’s head automatically shot to his bedside table even though he knew it was the wrong tone for his phone.

  “Dan McCarthy!” Emma called through the door, her excitable and chirpy voice from the night before suddenly back in operation.

  “What?”

  “How do I switch on this crappy old TV? Someone tracked down those Australian treasure hunter guys, and they’re saying the letter’s legit.”

  D minus 81

  Drive-In

  Birchwood, Colorado

  Emboldened by the news that the folder’s letter from the Australian company 3-T really had been sent by the firm’s founder, Dan drove the short distance from his house to the old drive-in with a smile on his face. Even though the Australians didn’t have the original letter from Mr Kloster nor a record of the address they had sent their reply to, Dan and Emma were both delighted with the development.

  As Dan said: “If everyone knows that one of the documents is real…”

  Dan was so energised by 3-T’s announcement that he agreed without argument to deliver Emma’s pre-prepared statement himself. He ran through it before leaving and agreed that it was a measured and sensible way to “open a dialogue,” as Emma put it. The extra few lines they added to touch on the significance of 3-T’s announcement made it even better.

  They pulled up at the old drive-in to find the same three news vans that had been at Dan’s house the previous night. At first Dan was surprised that there weren’t more, but Emma explained the basic concept that a story became less valuable to each reporter as the number of reporters increased. It was in their interests to keep the interview quiet.