Second Contact, page 17
part #2 of Not Alone Series
SUNDAY
C minus 54
RMXT Studio #1
Manhattan, New York
In a labyrinthine studio complex whose corridors she had walked only too many times in the past, Emma fastidiously ran through her key points from the previous night’s prep work and made sure that Timo knew how to deal with anything that might come up during his imminent high-pressure appearance on Focus 20/20.
They had nothing to worry about from longtime ally Billy Kendrick’s appearance via satellite, while shock-jock Joe Crabbe wasn’t taken seriously enough by anyone to pose any kind of meaningful threat. Almost everything Emma and Timo discussed related to the complex relationship between GSC Chairman William Godfrey and Prime Minister John Cole, the man who once served as his deputy. Cole himself wouldn’t be on the panel, of course, and would instead be represented by the proxy of his senior advisor Jack Neal, who both Emma and Godfrey knew only too well.
There was no love lost between any of them, but Emma repeated herself several times in telling Timo that his priority was making sure that Jack didn’t manage to link Cole to Timo in an effort to leech some of his public goodwill. Emma knew that Jack would sycophantically fawn over Timo’s recently announced ambitions to develop new space-related technologies via his Fiore Frontiere program, and she drove the same point home over and over again until she felt sure that Timo understood that any association with Jack — and by extension Cole — would prove toxic in the long run.
Timo admitted to having paid little attention to British politics during Cole’s first year as Prime Minister, but even he knew very well that Cole certainly wasn’t without his detractors at home, with critics ranging from traditionalists within his own party to all manner of outsiders. One senior party figure, speaking for many, had even publicly commented that Chairman Godfrey’s otherwise stellar legacy would be “forever stained by his decision to handpick a successor who isn’t fit to be the chairman of a county darts league.”
Indeed, some had gone so far as to posit that Godfrey picked a bad successor on purpose in order to make it easy for him to reclaim the party leadership when his GSC term-limit expired.
Although Godfrey himself said very little about Cole as an individual, he also made no secret of his intention to return to domestic politics when the time came. And since anyone with a pulse understood perfectly well that a leadership challenge from a returning William Godfrey was not one that John Cole could hope to survive unless Godfrey’s name and image were irredeemably tarnished in the meantime, it had come as little surprise to anyone that Cole had seemingly gone out of his way on several occasions to make Godfrey’s life as difficult as he could.
The only personal comment Godfrey let slip was his view that John Cole and Jack Neal were “a match made in heaven”, and even then he left everything else to subtext.
What wasn’t publicly known was that Godfrey remained personally affronted by Jack’s snakelike decision to renege on a handshake agreement that he would never work with Cole after leaving Godfrey’s side.
Emma knew that Godfrey would be biting his tongue in an effort not to snap at Jack during the panel, and that Jack would likely be doing everything he could to bait him.
The instruction to Timo was simple: stay out of it.
In the other direction, Cole still bore an intense grudge over something that had happened in China on the night of DS-1’s ill-fated launch. It had been bad enough that Godfrey chose to pose with President Slater and Chinese Premier Ding Ziyang with Cole watching from the sidelines, but the second snub cut Cole even deeper. This snub had come when Godfrey sent Cole to conduct an interview with some of the attendant press, only for Jack to later reveal that Godfrey had asked him to make sure the press weren’t recording and wouldn’t share any of Cole’s words.
Knowing that Godfrey had considered him a liability was all the motivation John Cole would ever need.
What Emma made clear to Timo was that Godfrey’s behaviour and political tactics, while often distasteful, were consistent with an age old power-for-its-own-sake philosophy and tended to stay within certain loosely defined bounds of acceptability. Cole, meanwhile, thrived on chaos. Emma used the metaphor of Godfrey being a particularly venomous snake and Cole being a particular virulent pathogen; both were dangerous, but the latter’s behaviour was altogether less predictable.
With Jack Neal present in New York as nothing more than a mouthpiece for Cole, a wariness of their bull-in-a-china-shop approach was crucial to Timo’s hopes of surviving the night untainted and unscathed.
Timo, for his part, had impressed Emma throughout the day by remaining focused on the advice she gave him and making no mention of the blockbuster secret Dan had shared with him regarding Richard Walker’s hoax. Like a character actor getting deep into a role, Timo seemed to recognise that consistently acting like nothing had changed was the only way he could make it through the panel without saying the wrong thing by mistake.
As Emma was about to skirt that rule by quickly checking that Timo still felt okay about staying quiet, the voice of a young studio intern called through the door after three quick knocks: “Um, Ms Ford?”
“One second,” Emma said to Timo. She opened the door. “Yeah?”
The intern gulped and blinked several times. He didn’t look overly intimidated by Emma’s presence — she knew that look well, and this wasn’t it — but he was clearly uncomfortable with whatever he was about to say.
“Spit it out,” she said.
The intern nodded quickly, as if trying to shake away his hesitation. He then spoke just as quickly: “Mr, uh, Chairman Godfrey asked me to give you a message. He told me to say that you’re on the wrong side, but that he won’t hold it against you as long as you play by the rules.”
Emma turned to Timo. “I’ll be back in a minute.”
The same young intern again knocked on the door of an occupied room within RMXT’s Manhattan studio complex. This time, however, the panelist on the other side was William Godfrey.
“I have a message for Chairman Godfrey,” the intern said when someone else opened the door.
Godfrey’s voice replied, increasing in volume as he moved towards the door: “What did she say?”
The intern glanced uneasily at something out of Godfrey’s view, prompting the GSC supremo to step out of the room to see what he was looking at. Immediately, Godfrey recoiled very slightly in instinctive surprise at the unexpected sight of Emma Ford. Though his eyes were still and focused on hers, his facial muscles moved in the subtle way a trained observer like Emma recognised as telltale signs of being unpleasantly surprised.
“Well if it isn’t Emma Ford,” Godfrey eventually began. “What brings you—”
While shaking her head, Emma raised a single finger in the air between them. She counted the longest five-count of her life, ignoring the triple-quick heartbeats thumping in her chest, and then lowered the finger.
Godfrey stayed quiet, somewhere between amused and confused.
Emma inhaled deeply and shook away her lingering doubts. “The next time you feel like threatening me,” she said, very firmly, “at least have the balls to say it to my face.”
At that, she walked away.
“Wait,” Godfrey called after her.
She ignored it.
“Emma, please!”
This gave her pause; a please from William Godfrey was rare indeed. “What?” she asked, stopping in her tracks but not yet turning around.
“There’s something I want you to see. I promise, it’ll take no more than a minute.”
When Emma finally turned to face him, Godfrey curtly dismissed the lingering intern with a decisive hand gesture before beckoning Emma towards his room.
Curiosity carried her to the door. “This better be quick.”
“Oh, it will be,” Godfrey said. He then opened the door, revealing several stunned faces all staring at Emma.
She looked around the room, taking in the countless tablets, laptops and printed charts on every surface and in almost every hand. She heard the last voices dying down towards the back of the room as the hush filtered its way across. Her eyes continued to dart around, looking for something meaningful in this beehive-like roomful of aides.
“Twelve Emma Fords,” Godfrey said. “Each as disposable as the last, each as self-important as the next.”
Some of his aides looked to the floor, some looked at each other, and some pretended to keep working on whatever they’d been looking at before Emma arrived.
None were as uncomfortable or embarrassed as Emma.
“You think you’re so special,” Godfrey said, addressing Emma directly but still speaking loudly through the wide-open door. He waited for her to look at him; when she eventually and reluctantly did, he shook his head. “Dan is special,” he continued, his words now positively dripping with derision. “You were just the first shark who smelled his blood.”
Emma felt her face reddening. There was anger; there was embarrassment; and there was a swirling combination of the two, far more potent than the sum of its parts.
Godfrey’s eyebrows seemed to rise halfway up his forehead as he tilted his head back and dismissively flicked his hand outwards, as he’d done to the nameless intern moments earlier. “You can go now,” he said.
Rendered speechless, Emma put all of her effort into trying to make sure that her expression didn’t reflect her feelings.
“Oh, and here’s a little piece of advice for the road,” Godfrey added, leaning in close. “Don’t start fights you can’t win.”
Godfrey then closed the door, leaving Emma stunned and alone in the corridor wondering what had just happened.
She closed her eyes for a few seconds, which proved long enough for the embarrassment to fade and anger to take over completely. At first there was an element of anger at herself for playing into his hands by walking back when he called her, but this was nothing compared to her all-consuming rage directed squarely at Godfrey himself.
When she arrived back at Timo’s dressing room, he asked the obvious question: “What did he want?”
“Change of plan,” Emma said. “Godfrey wants a war, and that’s exactly what he’s going to get.”
C minus 53
McCarthy Residence
Birchwood, Colorado
Feeling a mixture of trepidation and excitement, Dan sat down on the couch next to his father’s wheelchair in preparation for the big Focus 20/20 panel.
Clark was still nowhere to be seen after a full day doing overtime at the precinct, if the story he told Henry was true. He had been gone when Dan first went upstairs in the morning and hadn’t so much as called since then, so he knew nothing yet of Dan’s unplanned excursion to Richard Walker’s cornfield.
Emma had way too much going on for Dan to try calling her before the show; and since she hadn’t taken any of his calls the previous day, he didn’t think she would have been in much of a mood to talk to him, anyway.
Throughout the day so far, as well as during several sleepless hours after returning home from Walker’s place, Dan had been working frenetically in his basement, invigorated by his new information and even more so by the overnight reaffirmation that the Messengers really were close. Although none of Dan’s new and speculative leads were yet firm enough to act on, he no longer felt a crushing mix of helplessness and impatience in his chest.
The Messengers had indirectly but overtly communicated with him the previous night, and he had every faith that they would do so again extremely soon. This wasn’t to say he was prepared to rest on his laurels, however; and even as he sat down next to Henry, he was thinking about his next research moves.
Momentary fear had struck him on a few occasions during the day, always concerning whether or not Timo would be able to make it through the panel without letting any of his new knowledge slip. Dan had no doubts at all that Timo would be trying to keep the secret to himself — Emma’s powers of persuasion were never in question — but he understood that there was an inherent risk in having brought Timo in on the full truth when he did, right before Timo was about to appear on live TV and spar with some hostile fellow panelists.
Dan thought back to how he had felt prior to his own ill-fated appearance on Marco Magnifico’s live hypnosis show, when he was desperate to keep the existence of Hans Kloster’s explosive handwritten letter to himself for a few more hours. He had succeeded in the end on that occasion, largely thanks to Emma and Mr Byrd, but he was under no illusions that keeping quiet about a partially translated letter was in the same league as keeping quiet about a world-changing truth like the one Timo now knew.
Despite these thoughts, Dan didn’t regret his action for a second. He regretted the way it had to go down, and particularly the difficulties it had caused for Emma, but he had felt and still felt that he simply had to bring Timo in. And since it naturally wouldn’t have been safe to do so over the phone or via any other electronic method of communication, the one-off opportunity of a face-to-face handover of a short written explanation was literally too good to miss.
“20/20 ain’t what it used to be,” Henry mused in the moments before the show began. “Even when it’s something big like this, it’s all politicians. Back in the day, they had athletes… movies stars… you name it.”
“Kaitlyn Judd was on the panel when I appeared via satellite,” Dan said.
Henry shrugged. “The exception that proves the rule. You know what I mean. I think I’ve just gotten old enough to see through the posturing and soundbites. You know I wish I’d been here last year when you were going through everything, but one thing I’m glad I missed living through in real time was all the political crap that went along with the leak.”
“I get that, but this is totally different,” Dan replied. “Last time, the political posturing took weeks and it came in dribs and drabs. This time, the main players are all sitting in the same room at the same time and getting ready to fight for position in a no-holds-barred, forty-minute slugfest. This is huge.”
Short of telling Henry what was going on behind the very curtain which Dan had endured such pains to keep in place, there was no surefire way of stressing just how important the next forty minutes could be.
This, as well as Henry’s comments about not having lived through the IDA leak as it happened, sharpened Dan’s focus as to why the curtain had to stay between them.
The trio of Dan, Clark and Emma had gone through it all together, living each revelation and counter-revelation in real time; an experience no one else could ever understand. They had stood together in turmoil in the kitchen when Richard Walker’s now-dead assistant arrived in the middle of the night to reveal that the supposed cover-up was in fact a lie dressed up as a secret by way of an unbelievably intricate hoax; they had stood together in awe in Lolo National Forest as the real Messengers arrived to make the lie come true; and they had stood together in the old drive-in lot to draw a line under the whole thing in front of the media’s cameras. No one could ever understand what they had gone through together — not even Henry.
Aside from that stood Dan’s second consideration. When they had learned it was a hoax, it was more than hard enough for any of them to take. But for Henry it would be a heart-wrenching double-whammy to learn that not only had Richard Walker lied to the world, but that his own sons had known this for a year and had been lying to him about it ever since.
Allied to this, one of Henry’s mottos had always been “don’t drag other people into your problems”. And given that sharing the secret with Henry would achieve nothing except easing Dan’s conscience and driving the family apart, he had no intention of ever doing so. Making the secret public would be bad for the world, as Dan and the others understood very well, but it would be positively crushing for Henry McCarthy.
As the long-running Sunday evening show’s entrance music began, still marked in the recesses of Dan’s mind as the unwelcome soundtrack to the end of his weekend and an imminent return to school, he settled comfortably in his seat.
All he wanted was to see Timo make it through unscathed.
As far as Dan knew, the next forty minutes provided an opportunity to lose a lot and gain very little, so a non-event would do him just fine.
What he didn’t know was that Emma had very different plans.
C minus 52
RMXT Studio #1
Manhattan, New York
“Welcome everyone to a very special edition of Focus 20/20,” said Marian de Clerk, the show’s long-running and universally respected host. “As I’m sure you’re aware, today’s show is as live as live can be, coming at you from the heart of New York City. Now, let’s get right to business and meet our esteemed panel.”
Timo Fiore, first to fall under the camera’s focus, gave the simplest introductory remark of all: “Hello, everybody.”
Jack Neal gave a half nod when his turn came next, looking fairly disinterested. “Thanks for having me back, Marian. We have a lot to cover, so I’ll join my esteemed friend Timo in wasting none of our time on smart introductory remarks. All I’ll say is that I’m here in a personal, quote-unquote unofficial, capacity. I’m not here to speak on anyone else’s behalf.”
“I’m not your friend,” Timo said, speaking out of turn. He took the resultant rebuke from de Clerk on the chin, having listened carefully to Emma’s advice and thus understanding that he couldn’t let Jack get away with any comments like that.
“Well, I am Timo’s friend, and I’m extremely happy to be there in spirit via satellite,” Billy Kendrick smiled from a giant screen on the wall of the studio, visible to everyone on the panel. “Truth be told, I’m happy to be anywhere other than the room on Kerguelen where Godfrey’s GSC goons illegally held me against my will for several hours with no food and no phone call. But in any case, thanks for having me, Marian; it’s always a pleasure.”
