The old drive-in had only actually functioned as a drive-in for seven years of Dan’s life, but nothing else had ever filled the lot for long without going out of business. Because of this, even newcomers to Birchwood knew the lot as the drive-in. There was no screen, of course, just a desolate site that looked more like an abandoned car dealership. Dan had a few vague memories of watching movies with Clark, fighting over their laser pointers and toy binoculars from atop the small overlooking hill where other like-minded kids used to gather to avoid the entrance fee. That probably played a part in the drive-in going out of business, he reflected only now.
Dan parked his car and sat quietly for a few seconds in the dimly lit lot. “I’m not talking to Blitz,” he announced.
“You already told them that you—”
“And now you’re going to tell them that I’m not,” Dan interrupted.
Emma looked out at the same Blitz News reporter she had chased away from Dan’s house less than an hour earlier. “Dan, sometimes you have to work with assholes. That’s just how it is.”
“Maybe for you. What were you threatening the Blitz guy about, anyway? Outside, when you said you would “make the call” if he didn’t leave. What call?”
“I was just going to call his boss,” Emma said. “Well, I was going to call my boss and get her to call his boss’s boss. The ultimate threat would have been that we would freeze Blitz out of everything going forward, but I can’t make that kind of threat by myself. And we made a deal, anyway. So unless you want to start a war with the biggest news network around, we have to do this. Just concentrate on the other two cameras. You can ignore Blitz if you want.”
Dan was still shaking his head. “The deal was clear: they got an interview here if they left me alone at home. They didn’t keep their side of it. They published the photos they took right before the deal and they came back right after it. Go out and tell them the deal’s off.”
“Dan…”
“I can sit here all day,” he said.
Emma stepped outside and made a phone call. Dan rolled his window down to listen.
“I know, I know,” Emma said. “That’s what I told him. But we did make an explicit deal with them, and they did break it.”
Dan couldn’t fault her for doing as he asked.
“Okay,” Emma said. “And you’re giving me the authority to tell them that? Okay. Bye.” She gave Dan a thumbs-up, but the look on her face suggested that the call had been the easy part.
Emma then walked towards the Blitz News van. Dan couldn’t hear what they were saying even with his window rolled all the way down, but the Blitz reporter was laughing about something. After a few minutes, a woman walked over to join them from the ACN van. She stood beside Emma.
Almost immediately, the Blitz News van drove away.
Dan stepped outside and Emma introduced him to the two remaining crews. Maria Janzyck from ACN was the only on-air talent on the scene and had fallen into quite an exclusive. Dan didn’t catch her cameraman’s name. The two people from Blue Dish Network were a husband and wife team; Trey and Louise. Dan would later learn that Trey had launched Blue Dish a few years earlier, hoping to fill a gap in the market somewhere between the big networks and the citizen journalists who recorded shaky footage of developing stories. Their two-person operation couldn’t be everywhere, but Trey and Louise had developed a decent reputation as the first responders of Colorado’s media world.
Trey looked to be in his early to-mid thirties. He had dark skin and an athletic build; not as tall as Dan, but more aesthetically proportioned. He did the talking for Blue Dish. “This is some secret you’ve dug up,” he said to Dan, smiling as he firmly shook his hand.
Dan liked Trey right away. He turned towards Emma, gloating that Trey so readily believed him.
Maria seemed more reserved and businesslike. As Dan had already considered, this was surely going to be the biggest break of her career. Her faintly Asian features displayed a tension Dan could easily understand.
Emma explained what was going to happen: Dan would read out his statement and accept a few questions. He would answer only the ones he wanted to. Nothing would be broadcast live, and nothing that Emma didn’t sign off on would be broadcast at all. No one argued. Dan couldn’t help but be impressed by the effortless air of authority Emma exuded. At first glance she didn’t look very imposing; she was blonde, textbook pretty, short and slender. Her accent had a certain tenderness to it, too, but an intangible “It Factor” made sure that Emma was always heard when she wanted to be.
Maria quietly but firmly made clear that Trey couldn’t use any footage containing her voice for strict contractual reasons beyond her control, so Emma agreed that any questions Maria asked would be repeated by Trey prior to Dan’s answer. Maria agreed, since it would be as trivial for her cameraman to cut Trey out of their footage as it would be for Trey to cut her out of his.
“Uh, I don’t usually talk,” Trey said to Emma. “Can you repeat it?”
Emma shook her head. “I’m working under a strict NPA clause. No Public Association. I can’t be on screen in any way. And obviously none of you can tell anyone I’m here.”
Dan made a note to ask her about this.
“I’ll do it,” said Trey’s wife Louise. She climbed out from their van, where she had been doing something with all of the cables. Louise spoke with the same focused and professional air as Maria from ACN, unlike the more animated Trey who seemed excited by Dan’s story on a more personal level. Louise was also heavily pregnant.
With the cameras and lighting set up, Dan read his statement flawlessly. The ACN cameraman put it on a real autocue for him, which made it much easier to look towards the cameras.
The statement was very straightforward. Dan explained for the first time that the IDA thief dropped the folder in a collision, and he succinctly defended his decision to leak the documents rather than take them to the police by saying that he didn’t think they would take him seriously. He then said that he was willing to engage with the media if they kept a respectful distance, stopping short of naming Blitz but leaving little doubt over who and what he was talking about.
Dan ended by touching on the Australian letter, thanking 3-T for coming forward and urging any in-the-know government workers from Argentina or Austria to do the same.
After a few questions from each team, all of which were fairly soft and most of which Dan could answer without having to consult Emma, Louise asked Dan if the old drive-in would be a regular interview spot. Dan didn’t know how often he would want to give interviews or statements, but he confirmed that this would indeed be the chosen spot whenever he did.
As soon as Emma announced that everything recorded so far was fair game, Louise and the ACN team retired into their respective vans to prepare their footage for immediate broadcast.
Emma stepped away to make another phone call, leaving Dan and Trey alone.
“This is real,” Trey said. It wasn’t a question.
“This is real,” Dan echoed.
“So what happens when they eventually have to admit it? The government, I mean.”
“Hopefully we’ll find out soon,” Dan said. He checked that Emma wasn’t looking then leaned in towards Trey’s ear. “Listen, could you get something for me without telling anyone? I can’t stress how important that is. You can’t tell anyone, not even Louise.”
Trey nodded enthusiastically. His eyes lit up.
“And you can’t ask any questions.”
“Yeah. No. Totally.”
“Okay,” Dan said. “I need a little electronic thing that translates German to English. I don’t want to use anything online or any apps on my phone… nothing that could be traced. They probably sell something like this for tourists. But I need one that does phrases as well as words, so it’s not too literal.”
“Done,” Trey said, impressing Dan by not asking any questions.
“And this is more out-there, but there’s a really old book about cal
ligraphy at Wolf & Sons. I can’t remember exactly what it’s called, but I stacked it last week. Do you know Wolf & Sons? It’s just past the bowling alley on the way into the city.”
“I know the bowling alley,” Trey said.
“Good. The book was still there yesterday afternoon, so you should be able to get it.”
“How much will this stuff cost?”
“The book is $40,” Dan said. “I don’t know about the translator, but I can get $85 by tonight. That’ll be enough, right?”
Trey nodded. “Meet back here at six?” he suggested. “P.M., this time.”
“Yeah,” Dan smiled. “Thanks.” He shook Trey’s hand again.
In Trey’s eyes, Dan saw a look of total excitement mixed with desperate restraint, like a puppy staring at a treat and being asked to wait.
“Fine,” Dan conceded. “One question.”
“Is the handwritten thing about the spheres a translated extract of something else?” Trey asked without missing a beat. “Because if it is…”
Dan was silent, grasping only now what he immediately realised should have been obvious from the start.
Emma finished her phone call on the other side of the lot. “We should get out of here,” she called to Dan, slowly walking over as she fiddled with her phone.
“I won’t tell anyone,” Trey promised, looking right into Dan’s eyes.
Dan flicked his eyes towards Emma and then back to Trey. “Neither will I,” he whispered.
D minus 80
10 Downing Street
London, England
William Godfrey emerged from his front door to greet a small and impatient press pack. The first surprise for the reporters was the presence of John Cole, who stood next to Godfrey like a spare part.
None of the reporters had any idea of what was coming.
Godfrey’s original plan had been to raise the British public’s awareness of Dan McCarthy and the American government’s supposed cover-up of the evidence he had posted online.
The first draft of Godfrey’s short speech included a handful of barbs at President Slater, but John Cole had since risen to the occasion and suggested that Godfrey should not only go hard at Slater but also attack what Cole genuinely perceived as American hypocrisy over China.
Now, Godfrey held a new speech in his hand.
In their hour-long discussion, Godfrey and Cole ultimately decided to abandon the original plan of homing in on the headline-grabbing alien issue, opting instead for a scattergun approach intended to hit as many touchy subjects as humanly possible. Both knew that even if Slater addressed almost all of their points when she responded, there was bound to be at least one that she missed which Godfrey could then pounce upon to accuse her of being evasive. As Cole said: “If we fire ten bullets, she can’t dodge them all.”
Crucially, Godfrey felt confident that he could make such a series of outrage-inducing statements without it seeming too forced.
A fourth-generation Old Etonian who openly described himself as “posh and proud”, Godfrey had once been accused of harking back to the days of the empire when making sweeping statements about other countries and cultures. He hadn’t shied away from this, boasting in parliament that his ancestry could be directly traced to a viceroy on his father’s side and a line of admirals on his mother’s. Even as recently as his first election campaign as party leader, Godfrey raised eyebrows on both sides of the Atlantic by voicing his desire “to return Britain to its rightful place as leader of the free world” during a press address in which he was standing side by side with President Slater’s predecessor.
Given his history of making these kinds of “gaffes”, which were in fact carefully calculated political moves, a three-minute rant brought on by the pressure of the moment wouldn’t be seen as particularly out of character. Godfrey had even broken the golden rule of European politics on more than one occasion by mentioning the war, so nothing he was about to say would raise suspicion over his motives.
And really, the crux of the matter for William Godfrey was that he had absolutely nothing to lose. Even as the reporters aimed their eyes and camera’s at Godfrey’s front door, two workers behind them were still scrubbing away the last of the paint dropped by the blood drones hours earlier.
Godfrey felt like a prisoner in his own home; a punch line in his own realm; a jester in his own court. He straightened his new handwritten notes and thanked the press for coming.
No one would be laughing in three minutes.
* * *
“Dan McCarthy,” Godfrey began.
Confused reporters looked at each other, having expected a comment on the 3pm protest march whose participants could already be heard in the distance.
“That’s the name they don’t want us to say. We’ve had Assange, we’ve had Snowden, and now we have McCarthy. But just like the other two, the American government doesn’t want us to take him seriously. Richard Walker wasted no time in going straight to a character assassination, bringing up irrelevant medical conditions and assuming an even more condescending tone than usual. I don’t want to lionise Dan McCarthy or stand here and tell you that he’s telling the truth, but, well… what if he is?”
John Cole looked straight ahead and nodded along with Godfrey’s words.
“Maybe we shouldn’t laugh at this “IDA leak” like the American government wants us to,” Godfrey continued. “Maybe the only thing Richard Walker was right about is that we and America’s others allies should indeed feel aggrieved by the idea of the Americans hiding something to do with aliens. I’m just saying: maybe.”
Cole nodded again, but everyone was looking at Godfrey. None of the press could remember a prime minister ever saying the word “aliens”. There had been abstract talk of potential “extraterrestrial intelligences” and “habitable planets”, and even the occasional declassification of militarily recorded “UFO phenomena”.
But aliens? No one said aliens.
“I’ve been told in the last few minutes that at least one of the letters in McCarthy’s leak has been verified,” Godfrey said, “but I’m not jumping to any conclusions. All I’ll say for now is that I and many others in high positions have previously noted, in private, that Nazi rocket technology advanced inexplicably suddenly in a period that corresponds with the dates of their expeditions to the obscure locations mentioned in McCarthy’s leak. The only other thing I’ll say is that over 65% of the American public believe in intelligent extraterrestrial life, so I would advise President Slater to be less dismissive of her electorate than Richard Walker was yesterday.”
After a brief moment of silence, John Cole furtively nudged Godfrey’s arm. “Say it,” he muttered under his breath.
Godfrey looked at his notes and hesitated before the line that would light the touchpaper underneath his already flammable speech. He looked up at the cleaners scrubbing blood-drone paint from his own street and decided to go for it.
“Why should we automatically believe the American government on this issue?” Godfrey asked with more than a hint of contempt in his voice. “They lie about everything else.”
Had the reporters and cameras not been fixated on Godfrey, they would have noticed the roguish grin spreading across John Cole’s face.
“And as for their hypocrisy on China!” Godfrey chuckled. Now committed to the speech, he threw himself headfirst into a convincing delivery. “Do they forget that they literally locked Chinese scientists out of any kind of space cooperation? This was their doing, and no one else’s. Who can blame China for seeking new frontiers? If we had the money, we would be doing the same.
“And speaking of space… do Richard Walker and the puppets who applauded his “red flag” jibe also forget that they are the ones who defiled our moon with a national flag? While we’re on it, let’s consider why they were able to go to the moon in the first place. Perhaps because they were so cash rich with the money they plundered from Europe under the Marshall Plan’s indefensible terms? With our continent fla
ttened by the fight against fascism, they arrived just in time to claim the credit and then proceeded to bill us for their help!”
Godfrey shook his head, selling his annoyance well. The next line was another that came verbatim from Cole, but Godfrey put his own spin on it with some derisive emphasis: “And if you want to know how they get on in the wars they fight without our help, well, just ask Richard Walker. Cheese wire, anyone?”
Cole pretended to scratch his forehead in an effort to hide his gleeful amazement that Godfrey had actually said it.
“But as for Slater,” Godfrey sighed, bringing his voice down to indicate that he was almost finished, and being very deliberate in referring to the President by her surname only. “Whenever she gets home from her holiday in France, I won’t be holding my breath for a comment. She’s scared. That’s why she sent Richard Walker out.
“There are cameras in France, Valerie,” Godfrey continued, now being openly condescending. “But I’ve been in this game long enough to know that their corporate media will conveniently unearth a “hot story” about guns or abortion or one of their other wedge issues and Slater will dive right into it while pretending she doesn’t want to talk about it, just like her kind always do.
“I should point out that Slater isn’t the worst of them — even if she is where she is mainly because she ticks the right boxes for the diversity crusaders — so I suppose there’s a small chance that she might give this some real attention. That’s why I’m saying this. I want resolutions to these issues. I want a frank discussion about Dan McCarthy and why the American government is being so evasive regarding the content of his leak. That’s what I want. I don’t want an argument, I just want clarity and openness on this crucial alien issue.”
Not Alone Page 9
