Second Contact, page 15
part #2 of Not Alone Series
Godfrey sat down and thought for a few seconds. He had long suspected that Emma Ford was advising Timo Fiore; and while this confirmation was anything but welcome, it at least presented an opportunity to react. “Does that mean her house is empty?” he asked.
“No, sir. We have multiple local sightings of a Tara Ford, her sister, as well the sister’s own personal social media posts and location data which corroborate that she is currently residing in Birchwood. But can I ask why Emma’s involvement with Timo seems to have come as such a surprise? You posited this very idea yesterday.”
“There’s a difference between advising him and flying to New York with him,” Godfrey groaned, frustrated as usual by the slow thinking of his underlings. “Ford hates flying, and God knows she doesn’t need the money… however much he’s paying her. There’s a lot more going on here than you realise. They’re either up to something big, or they know something big. Either way, I intend to find out.”
“We’ll do what we can, sir.”
Godfrey rose to his feet again and returned to the window with a spring in his step. “With the sister in Birchwood — and especially alone in Birchwood — we finally have a weak link,” he said. “Now do your job and exploit it.”
C minus 60
Drive-in
Birchwood, Colorado
Clark had far less patience than usual with the well-meaning cab driver’s delighted surprise — “You’re Clark McCarthy!” — but he tried as hard as he could to be polite.
He was pushed to the limit when the driver later grew curious and asked why he was going home from an airport with no luggage. Clark came up with the perfunctory but convincing lie that he’d driven someone to the airport and left the car so they could drive home when they returned.
“Who were you driving?” the persistent driver asked. “Was it Dan? What does he think about all this Kerguelen stuff, anyway? Has he said anything?”
“Listen, man, I’m pretty tired here. It wasn’t Dan and he hasn’t said anything about anything, okay?”
The driver nodded, message firmly received, and didn’t speak again until Clark asked him if he knew the old drive-in. “Everyone in the world knows that drive-in,” the man replied with a warm grin.
It had been a long time since Clark last arrived in Birchwood in a car he wasn’t driving. He passively took in his surroundings; the sights included the indistinct turnoff that led to Richard Walker’s secret home, and later the ‘Proud Home of Dan McCarthy’ notice at the bottom of the ‘Welcome to Birchwood’ sign. Once again, he couldn’t help but wonder what must have been going through Dan’s mind, both when he made the unilateral decision to tell Timo everything and also in the aftermath when the magnitude of his actions started to sink in.
Given the hour, New Kergrillin’ Bar & Grill was far quieter than it had been the previous evening. Clark headed straight for the bar instead of the busier dining area. He saw Phil Norris sitting at the bar — his bar — and focusing on a newspaper’s crossword puzzle as he so often did. Clark then silently signalled to the bartender with two fingers, indifferent as to whether Phil would turn around and see him or if he’d make it to an empty booth unnoticed.
“There you go, Mr McCarthy,” the bartender said, settling that particular issue.
Phil saw the two beers and turned around expecting to see two people. “Thirsty?” he laughed when he saw only Clark. “You do know that drinks were only free last night, don’t you?”
“It’s my day off,” Clark said, pulling up a stool next to Phil.
Phil folded his newspaper. “Did Emma’s flight get away okay?”
“She’s on the way to New York,” Clark replied, choosing his words carefully. He was glad that Phil didn’t ask any further questions and instead joined him in indulging in a full day of much-needed distractions.
They ate twice, watched a few games on the big screens, drank a few beers and played some cards with the bar’s motley crew of Saturday regulars. It didn’t make Clark forget what had happened at the airport or stop worrying about what might happen next, of course, but it was a better day than he would have had if he’d gone home with Dan.
It was dark outside and both Henry McCarthy and Mr Byrd had arrived at the bar by the time Clark finally decided to make a move, and he opted to walk home rather than get another cab mainly because he didn’t want to face another excited driver. The mere thought of going home had brought the full weight of reality crashing back down onto his shoulders, and it was hard enough to keep himself together without any more prying questions.
“Spare any change, Mr McCarthy?” a croaky voice asked from the side of the steps outside New Kergrillin’.
Clark turned to see a rough-looking man around his own age, evidently homeless but not obviously under the influence of anything but hunger.
“I don’t have any cash,” Clark said. “You want something to eat?”
The man nodded gratefully. “Even better.”
Clark quickly returned inside and told Phil that he’d changed his mind about going home right away and now fancied grabbing a bite to eat before he left. He had taken leftovers home before, so it would be easy enough to order too much and pretend he was full.
“Just you?” Phil asked, folding his newspaper and picking it up.
Clark pretended to look around for a lost dining partner. “Uh, I think I came here by myself…”
Immediately, Phil’s demeanour changed. “Give me your card,” he snapped.
“What?”
“Deaf as well as stupid, are we?”
Clark couldn’t hide his confusion. “Phil, what are you talking about?”
Phil grabbed the sleeve of Clark’s coat and pulled him to the door. Clark could have planted his weight if he wanted to, but he didn’t know what was going on and went along with it for now.
At the door, Phil led Clark outside and pointed up to a security camera before motioning towards the homeless man. “Do you think I zip up the back? You think I’m running a charity here and that you get to decide how to spend its money?”
“Phil, the guy’s starving out here.”
“Give me your card,” Phil repeated.
Clark reluctantly handed over his meal-card, knowing there was no sense in holding on to it since it would be utterly worthless without Phil’s willingness to honour it.
“You can come in for a bite just this once,” Phil told the other man. “Just this once.”
The man keenly hurried inside, patting Phil’s arm in thanks as he went.
Once Clark’s wallet was back in his pocket, one card lighter, Phil smacked him across the side of the head with his newspaper.
“What the hell, man?” Clark protested, backing away.
“Lie to me again,” Phil hissed. “See how that works out for you.”
C minus 59
McCarthy Residence
Birchwood, Colorado
This is just a dream, Dan told himself.
The scene before him was familiar; a valley etched forever in his mind. A valley in Lolo National Forest.
There was nothing and no one around him in any direction, and the only thing more unnerving than the absolute tranquility was his unprecedented lucidity.
Dan had never felt anything like this, aware that he was dreaming but in control of his dream-time thoughts and even his dream-world movements. The closest feeling he could think of had come many years in the past when he had dreamed of looking down at his sleeping body, but even that was nothing like this.
This time he was experiencing a fantasy in first-person, somehow both immersed in the dream and aware that it was, ultimately, just a dream.
He looked up — he decided to look up — and there he saw the most awe-inspiring night sky he had ever seen. The depth of colour was like something from an astronomy textbook and the breadth of star coverage was breathtaking.
Breathtaking, however, was an insufficient adjective for what came next.
First came a sudden and total flash, less like the Kerguelen bolide than the full-screen camera interference that had been caused by the Messengers’ previous Earth-based interventions.
When the brief flash faded, an extremely prominent triangle filled a small area in the central part of the sky.
Dan made an effort to remember its apparent size, as well as its position relative to the waxing moon and some of the most immediately familiar constellations.
As quickly as the flash had faded, it returned. And this time, it brought Dan back to reality.
I’m not dreaming anymore, he thought, suddenly feeling very different.
The next thing he was aware of was a cold and wet sensation on his cheek, immediately followed by a more general feeling of being freezing cold.
Wait, I’m not even in my bed…
Dan’s vision then returned as his eyes shot open, only to be temporarily blinded by a bright but localised light source.
He instinctively raised a hand against the beam, and was straight away able to make out the shape of a dog right beside him. A spaniel, by the look of it, which had been happily licking his face until he came to.
Dan repositioned his hand and saw that this was not just any old spaniel. The feeling under his other hand was that of flattened corn, and it didn’t take long for his mind to fill in the blanks.
The flashlight beam quickly moved away, allowing his eyes to adjust and in doing so to confirm that he was indeed sitting in a small but neat crop circle. The holder of the flashlight then held it at arm’s length and pointed it back towards himself. The man’s other hand, by his side, was holding a shotgun.
The beam slowly moved up to the man’s face, confirming what Dan had already assumed to be true but had hoped to be wrong.
Dan closed his eyes momentarily and took a deep breath in preparation for whatever was coming next. Whatever that might be, he knew it couldn’t be good.
Because right there, stern and intense at the edge of the circle, stood none other than Richard Walker.
Part 3
Second Contact
“To one who has faith,
no explanation is necessary.
To one without faith,
no explanation is possible.”
Thomas Aquinas
C minus 58
Stevenson Farm
Eastview, Colorado
Uneasily, Dan watched Richard Walker and his flashlight beam heading off towards the edge of the cornfield and the cottage that lay beyond.
The night sky was overcast, in stark contrast to the incredibly clear sky Dan had seen over Lolo in his… well, dream didn’t seem like the right word.
Nor did vision, or hallucination, or even message.
Dan didn’t know what it was, but his mind quickly turned to the need to record as much of it as he could remember.
He began to move, shortening the distance between himself and Walker. This grew more difficult outside of the crop circle when all he could do was push the high corn aside with his hands, and because he had evidently left home in an unplanned rush — or an unknowing stupor, to be more accurate — he didn’t even have his phone to use its screen as a light.
Rooster, Walker’s ageing spaniel who had briefly fallen into Dan’s care when Walker was abducted a year earlier and whose animal instincts had played an important role in locating the precise landing spot of the Messengers’ forcefield-protected craft in Lolo National Forest, ran in slow but happy circles around Dan, excited to see an old friend.
At the edge of the field Dan thought very briefly about running away, but he was in no mood to back down. He didn’t consider it likely that Walker would have had a second interaction with the Messengers but pondered the possibility nonetheless; after all, Walker was leading Dan to the cottage and clearly wanted to talk about something. And aside from this, there was a fresh crop circle in the cornfield.
Dan saw no reason to fear Walker. Minutes earlier, he had been sitting in a daze while the old hermit stood over him with a shotgun; he knew that if Walker wanted to hurt him, he would no longer have been around to think about anything.
As it went, by the time he reached Walker’s door the only thing he was thinking about was the triangle in the sky.
When Dan reached the cottage, Walker was standing at the door. “Something tells me I’m not who you came here to see,” the old man boomed, his voice still as effortlessly resonant as ever. “But we need to talk.”
“I need a pen, paper, and two minutes of silence,” Dan said.
Walker raised his eyebrows and tipped his head back, looking down his nose at Dan for several seconds before holding out his hand to invite him inside.
A small table sat next to Walker’s shoes in the narrow hallway and Dan stood beside it while Walker fetched him a pen and paper from the kitchen. Dan didn’t look at anything but the table, concentrating instead on his mental image of the moon and the prominent constellations he had seen minutes earlier. The image of the triangle was etched in his mind, but what mattered was its position relative to everything else.
When Walker returned, Dan drew quickly while covering the image-in-progress with his other hand.
“What do you think I’m going to do?” Walker complained.
Dan ignored him. The end product of his efforts certainly lacked the precision and quality of the savant-like map to Lolo and the representation of the Messengers’ craft his hands had produced the previous year when he wasn’t in control of them, but it was a serviceable enough attempt and he was satisfied that the skyscape on the paper was fairly close to the one he’d seen.
With the drawing finished, Dan immediately folded it and put it in his otherwise empty pocket. He handed Walker the pen. “Thanks.”
Walker eyed him carefully for several seconds then returned the pen to the kitchen. Dan watched him this time and noticed that his limp was much more pronounced than he remembered. In the light of the house he also saw that Walker, wearing a grey dressing gown, had lost a serious amount of weight since their last meeting a year earlier.
Rooster lay comfortably at Dan’s feet, and Dan’s moments alone in the hallway were long enough to bring back memories of the fateful night when he had walked the very same hallway with not just Clark and Emma but also Ben Gold, who had just arrived in a panic at Dan’s door to confess his part in the hoax and to tell them that Walker was missing.
Dan looked along the short hallway to Walker’s bedroom door, remembering how Rooster had gone crazy whenever anyone touched the handle. He thought back to finally going inside and finding an empty bed, only to later see the security camera footage of Walker disappearing in a seven-second flash of light which coincided perfectly with the precise timing of the DS-1 launch disaster.
His eyes also flitted to the other doors, to the other rooms he had searched with Clark in the minutes before Ben Gold drove home for the last time to fetch the box of hoax evidence he would go on to dump at Dan’s house before killing himself in the IDA building’s parking lot.
It was a nice old cottage, but Dan’s memories of it weren’t exactly warm.
“Come on through,” Walker called.
Still feeling no fear, Dan accepted the invitation and walked quickly to the kitchen. Rooster thought about staying put in his comfortable spot beside the front door but ultimately followed his old friend.
“The GSC is a grave threat to the United States of America,” Walker said, wasting no time in getting to his point. “Godfrey is in charge for now, fine. He is a strong pro-West figure. But then what? Cole is already in Ding’s pocket, chipping away at Godfrey’s authority every chance he gets so that Godfrey is undermined and a Chinese appointment can fill the void.”
Despite his face being gaunt and his skin pale, Walker spoke with all the verve of his infamous press conferences from years gone by. Dan didn’t know why Walker was directing these comments at him, but he had nothing else to do but listen.
“And as you well know,” Walker went on, “the GSC has an absolute monopoly on launching anything into orbit, be it exploratory or defensive. But why should we believe that they’ll protect us? They hate us! After Godfrey’s gone, if something bigger than the Kerguelen meteor was heading for Dallas or New York — something big enough to flatten a city but not endanger global life — do you really think they would stop it? Do you really think they would give up the chance to put us on our knees? And give it twenty years for the technology to progress… if they ever discover that something is going to pass close by or maybe even land in the ocean, who’s to say they won’t knock that something off-course, straight into the continental US?”
Dan leaned back. “And people used to say I was paranoid.”
“And they were wrong,” Walker said, “because there was something going on at the IDA. Just like there’s something going on at the GSC.”
“Why are you telling me this?”
“Stick with Fiore,” Walker said. “I know Ford is with him, so you’re all clearly on the same page. Fiore is different from Cole and that rat-faced shit-stain Jack Neal, because Fiore’s actions are weakening the GSC as a whole and not just Godfrey’s position as Chairman. Billy Kendrick knows there’s something going on in Buenos Aires, too, and I never thought I’d be on the same side as that idiot.”
“You’re not on the same side as any of us,” Dan said. “Your lies are the whole reason the GSC exists.”
“An unfortunate side effect of halting Chinese expansion,” Walker sighed. “We do what we can in the moments when we have to act, McCarthy. If I hadn’t initiated the leak sequence I set up with Kloster all those years ago, they’d be halfway to Mars by now.”
