Second Contact, page 22
part #2 of Not Alone Series
He hadn’t tried at all on Sunday given how busy he knew Emma had been in New York, and throughout Monday so far he had been living in the faint hope that she might have called him. But while that hadn’t come to pass, he was very hopeful of getting through this time.
As soon as he dialled the number, he could tell by the tone that she wouldn’t pick up. It was the same tone he’d run into on Saturday: the tone that told him his number was no longer on her whitelist.
“No luck?” Clark said as Dan glumly walked back inside. Henry and Mr Byrd were gone. “You could always call Timo, or maybe try from my phone?”
Dan shook his head solemnly. “She doesn’t want to talk to me. I’m still off her whitelist.”
“To be honest, man, I think you’re still on her shit-list. That was pretty rough, what you did on the plane… dumping the truth on Timo like that when she had no way out. You know I’m always going to be on your side, but if anyone else did something like that to someone I cared about, I’d never forgive them.”
A few hours later, well into the evening, Clark banged loudly but with futility on the thick basement door. “Come up here,” he yelled into the intercom when he realised his banging wasn’t getting through.
Dan hurried up the stairs and was surprised to see Tara standing at Clark’s shoulder.
“It’s okay, her phone is on the table beside mine,” Clark said. “There’s something we need to talk about.”
Dan closed the door and stepped out of the basement. “Not down there. Dad’s not here, anyway.” He led the way to the couch, staring daggers at Clark for bringing Tara so close to the basement and the secrets within it. “What’s going on?”
“Some weirdo came to my door — Emma’s door — and he left this,” Tara said. She handed Dan a small box with his name and address handwritten on it in neat block capitals.
“What kind of weirdo?” he asked, not overly concerned since it now looked like a case of a birthday gift innocently delivered to the wrong address, rather than someone intentionally targeting Tara as he had initially feared before learning that the package was addressed to him.
She shrugged. “He was on a motorcycle. He had a helmet and everything — you’ll see it on the camera footage. But he didn’t even knock, he just left this box on the doorstep. I heard him arriving, but he was back on the bike by the time I got to the door so he maybe didn’t hear me calling to tell him it was the wrong address. Couriers and delivery guys don’t normally use motorcycles around here, do they?”
“It sounds weird, but they actually do,” Clark replied. “One delivery company, at least. Thanks for bringing this over, Tara, but it’s nothing to worry about.”
She sighed with relief, picking up her phone to leave. “Good. I was hoping it was just a birthday present. So many things are different around here, it’s hard to keep up.”
As soon as the door closed behind her, Dan began to open the box. “Why did you need me for that?” he asked as he ripped the sticky tape from thepackage.
“She wanted to talk to you,” Clark said. “It was easier to just call you up here than to say you were too busy, otherwise she might have wanted to hang around until you weren’t.”
Dan removed the box’s lid and dropped it to the ground. Inside, he saw a torn-up piece of paper.
“What the hell is that?” Clark asked.
Dan immediately tipped the pieces onto the coffee table beside Clark’s phone and turned them all right-side-up. Fortunately there were only nine pieces, so it took him only a few seconds to put them together.
Less fortunately, the content of the handwritten message was highly disconcerting:
‘Three can keep a secret if two of them are dead.’
“That has to be from Walker,” Clark said. “Right?”
“It better be from Walker,” Dan replied. “Because if it’s not…”
Clark picked up his phone then grabbed his car keys and coat. “Come on, man.”
“Seriously? Shouldn’t we tell Emma first, either via Timo or on your phone, like you said?”
“Emma’s not here! Listen, Dan: I’m not going to sit here and let that asshole mess with your head any more than he already has. You can come with me or you can stay here, but I’m going to get some answers — right fucking now.”
Dan stood up and walked to the door.
C minus 44
En route to Stevenson Farm
Eastview, Colorado
Dan held the pieces of the torn-up note in the palm of his clenched fist as Clark began the short drive towards Richard Walker’s farmhouse.
“It has to be from him,” Clark said, sounding very much like he believed his own words and wasn’t just trying to ease Dan’s mind. “You said you met him on Saturday night, so you’re obviously fresh in his mind.”
Dan didn’t say anything. Walker was the only sender who made any kind of sense, and the threatening note itself only really made sense as an attempt to nudge Dan towards revealing the full truth of the hoax. Given Walker’s earlier framing of Full Disclosure as a de facto “emergency stop button” capable of halting what he saw as the GSC’s endless and dangerous power creep, the motive was equally clear.
After just a few songs on the radio, Clark turned off the main road and onto the narrow trail that led to Walker’s cottage. “I haven’t been here since we brought his dog home on our way back from Lolo last year,” he said. “When you were here on Saturday night, did you notice if there were any new security systems?”
Dan shook his head. “I didn’t notice anything when I arrived; I was… you know, not exactly present. But when I left, the main floodlight definitely came on. Same as last year: motion-activated.”
“Okay… well, we’re here to talk to him, anyway, so it’s not like we don’t want him to know we’re coming.” Clark pulled up around sixty feet from the house and took the keys from the car’s ignition. “So how do you want to do this? Walk straight up to the door, or maybe honk the horn so he comes out and knows it’s us? You said he was carrying a shotgun, right?”
“I think he wanted us to come,” Dan said. “If this letter is from him — which it is — it was bait. And if he did want us to come, it’s because he wants to talk to us; not hurt us. Well… he wants to talk to me. I guess he might not be expecting you to be here, so maybe you should wait in the car at first?”
“No way, not happening. I’m coming out there with you when— oh, shit! Dan, get down!”
Dan squinted at the house, trying to see if Clark had been spooked by a sign of the door starting to open or by something else. Clark then forcefully made him lower his head, and after a brief moment of confusion Dan saw the problem.
As problems went, this was a big one: headlights, approaching from behind.
“Who the hell is that?” Clark asked, not exactly expecting Dan to know, either.
Now ducking for cover of his own accord, Dan replied more quietly than necessary: “He said Joe Crabbe is the only other person who knows where he lives. Maybe Crabbe’s just doing his usual supply run? He definitely doesn’t know anything about the hoax.”
“Well whatever he’s doing and whatever he already knows, he’s going to have some questions when he sees the car and comes over to check who’s inside. You think I should drive into the field or something before he gets too close?”
Dan glanced in the wing mirror. “The lights are almost here; he’s already way too close for you to go anywhere without him seeing us.”
Sure enough, within a few more seconds the car was in plain sight. When it came close enough for first the shape and colour and then the license plate to become evident, Dan’s face fell into his hands.
It wasn’t Joe Crabbe.
“What the hell is she doing here?” Clark groaned as Tara stepped out of Emma’s car and walked towards them. “And what the hell are we going to say when she asks us the same thing?”
With no answers and no options, Dan reluctantly rolled down his window as Tara approached.
“Hey,” she said, reaching into her pocket. “I’m glad you weren’t driving somewhere further away. Clark… I picked up your phone from the coffee table. I tracked mine to here; you must have it in your pocket.”
Clark tried to play it cool. He handed over Tara’s phone, an identical model to his own, and made a joke about how he should have known it wasn’t his on account of all the weird calls it kept getting.
“So what are you guys doing out here, anyway?” she asked.
“Uh, this is our uncle’s place,” Clark said. “We always stop by on either of our birthdays.” This immediately struck both him and Dan as the kind of lie that wouldn’t stand up to much scrutiny and would quickly collapse if Tara ever mentioned it in passing to Henry or anyone else, but right now their only concern was that it lasted long enough to get Tara back into Emma’s car.
Fortunately, she bought it.
Unfortunately, it lasted all of the few seconds until a light illuminated the farmhouse’s porch as the door opened and an instantly recognisable figure appeared.
Tara Ford’s mouth fell open. “Clark, that is not your uncle…”
C minus 43
Stevenson Farm
Eastview, Colorado
“Tara, you need to get out of here right now,” Clark said. He didn’t bark it as an order but his tone was as full of urgency as the words themselves. “Listen to me: I know this doesn’t make any sense, but Emma knows what’s going on. He’s not our friend… there’s just something we need to talk to him about.”
Finally, Tara looked away from Richard Walker and into the car. “Damn right it doesn’t make any sense!”
As Walker stood like a statue in the doorway, Rooster dashed out from behind him and bounded towards the car. Tara recoiled despite Dan’s insistence that he was friendly. She calmed down slightly when the dog innocently sniffed around her feet and then Emma’s car, apparently wondering as to the whereabouts of the Ford sister he was already acquainted with.
“You really do need to leave,” Dan said, more softly than Clark’s earlier attempt at making the same point. “We’ll explain everything later, but you’re not safe here. And you can’t tell anyone where we are or who lives here, okay? None of us would be safe if you did. Emma is supposed to be home tomorrow night, so if you can just forget about this until then…”
“Are you coming in or not?” Walker boomed from his doorway.
Dan and Clark both opened their doors to step out of the car.
Tara immediately grasped onto Dan’s arm. “I’m scared,” she said, very simply.
“You should be,” Clark said. “This isn’t a game and that’s why you need to go. But I’ll tell you what, okay? If you go home now, we’ll be there in like… twenty, twenty-five minutes at most. Can you do that?”
Tara nodded quickly and gulped. As her frightened eyes looked away from Clark and into Dan’s, it struck him for the first time that beyond her appearance and sometimes her accent, she really was nothing like Emma. Just like the McCarthy boys, the Ford girls were built for different things; evidently, Tara wasn’t built to handle a situation like this without Emma any more than Dan was without Clark.
Rooster thought about making an attempt to enter Emma’s car when Tara opened the door, but in the end he walked side by side with Dan towards his waiting owner.
“Who was the girl and why was she here?” Walker demanded as they reached the doorstep and the car pulled away.
Clark stepped forward and grabbed Walker’s collar, pressing his nose against the old man’s. “When I want you to talk, you’ll know.”
“Who was the girl and why was she here?” Walker repeated, perfectly parroting his initial tone. “I know it wasn’t Ford, because I know she’s busy cavorting around Europe with Fiore. Kudos for moving on so quickly, Dan.”
“Shut up,” Clark spat at him before briefly turning to Dan. “Ignore him. And as for you, what’s this game you think you’re playing sending stuff to our house? Bringing your shit to our doorstep?”
Walker pulled Clark’s hand off his collar and stepped back, naturally only being able to do so with Clark’s cooperation. He looked at Dan. “I have no idea what he’s talking about.”
“Don’t give me that crap,” Dan said. “No one else could have sent them. I didn’t know the first package was from you until the second one arrived, but then it made sense.”
“What second package?” Walker blurted out, his eyebrows raised. “Uh, what packages?”
Clark let out an exaggeratedly smug laugh and patted Dan on the back. “Nice one, man.”
“Touché, McCarthy,” Walker sighed, not sounding or appearing overly disappointed to have let it slip. “Now come inside and sit down.”
Clark held Dan back. “No.”
“No?”
“Walker, this isn’t a discussion,” Clark said very firmly. “This is a warning. Next time you try to mess with us, I’ll be back here — alone — and there’ll be no more warnings. Got that?”
Walker gave up on Clark and focused solely on Dan. “Just remember what I told you about Full Disclosure,” he said. “You have an emergency stop button, just like I did. President Slater finally said something today. Did you see it? Did you hear it? Did anyone see or hear it? After all that’s happened, all she puts out is a press release reaffirming her support for the GSC’s goals and operations? You see: that’s what we’re up against.”
“Stop talking like we’re on the same side,” Dan snapped. “We’re not allies. You’re the reason my life turned to shit! Your lies are the reason I can’t sleep at night, and now you’re going to stand there and pretend like we’re friends?”
“I didn’t say friends…”
“This is the last thing I’m ever going to say to you,” Dan said, “so I need you to hear it. If we thought that exposing your lies would be good for the world, we would have done it the night we found out. We don’t care about your politics or your grudges or your Cold War power fantasies — why can’t you get that through your head? The reason I live with this every single day is that there would be anarchy if I didn’t!”
“For a time, perhaps,” Walker said. “But things would die down eventually. Heads would roll far beyond the GSC’s walls, granted, but the world would bounce back. It always does.”
Dan shook his head and turned around to leave. There was no sense in trying to discuss it any further; he understood what kind of consequences would come with an exposé of the hoax, even if Walker pretended not to.
He knew that ripping the rug of reality from under the world’s collective feet wasn’t the kind of thing that could be bounced back from so easily — not when people would naturally suspect that their governments and leaders had been in on the double-twist all along. Especially now that the Kerguelen bolide had turned all kinds of planetary threats into water-cooler talk and headline topics, the revelation that society’s elected protectors were either complicit in such a hellish deceit or so complacent as to have been hoodwinked by a godforsaken hoax would lead to burning cities and chaotic uprisings.
Emma had once told Dan that people tended to riot when they were angry rather than scared. More recently, she had impressed upon him the unwelcome point that public order could flat-out collapse if people were suddenly struck with the levels of both which they would feel at the precise moment the hoax ever became public knowledge.
“Who was the guy on the bike that brought the package?” Dan suddenly asked.
“A regular courier,” Walker replied. “Don’t worry; I was careful. The pickup wasn’t here.”
Dan certainly didn’t need any convincing that Walker could keep things under wraps when he had to. Satisfied with that if nothing else, he then turned away and set off towards the car, prompting Rooster to bark in disappointment.
Clark crouched down and patted the dog’s head in a final farewell. “Thanks for your help at Lolo, little guy,” he said. “We won’t forget you.”
Clark then walked away to join Dan in the car.
“Don’t forget me, either,” Walker called after him, a certain spark back in his voice. “I’m not dead yet…”
C minus 42
Ford Residence
Birchwood, Colorado
Unsurprisingly, Tara was waiting outside when Dan and Clark returned home from Stevenson Farm. The confusion on her face was still tinged with fear over who she had seen standing in the doorway, rather than any anger over Clark’s initial lie that they were visiting their uncle or over their refusal to tell her what was going on there and then.
“Well?” she said. “What’s the big secret? How in the hell do you two know where Richard Walker lives… and why in the hell were you there?”
The brothers had already decided how to answer these inevitable questions, having hotly debated it on the short drive home. Clark wanted to say nothing on the matter and simply tell Tara to forget about it until Emma’s arrival back in Birchwood, now only around twenty-four hours away, at which point she could direct any questions to her. Dan, meanwhile, knew that wouldn’t fly. He insisted that they had to talk to Tara for at least a few minutes to make absolutely sure that she understood the importance of staying quiet.
Dan’s idea won out in the end, with Clark reluctantly agreeing to join him in case he accidentally said too much.
“Can we come in?” Dan asked.
Tara immediately opened the door, keen to get some answers and glad that they seemed willing to talk.
A huge projector screen greeted Dan as he stepped inside. It filled the whole height of the wall opposite Emma’s couch and was currently paused on a TV show he recognised. “When did Emma get this?”
“It’s pretty much always been there,” Tara said, pointing to the recess in the ceiling where the screen hid until it was called upon. Two days after arriving from New York, Tara’s previously entrenched habit of hiding her soft southern accent was now a thing of the past. “But I don’t think that really matters right now, do you?”
As soon as he dialled the number, he could tell by the tone that she wouldn’t pick up. It was the same tone he’d run into on Saturday: the tone that told him his number was no longer on her whitelist.
“No luck?” Clark said as Dan glumly walked back inside. Henry and Mr Byrd were gone. “You could always call Timo, or maybe try from my phone?”
Dan shook his head solemnly. “She doesn’t want to talk to me. I’m still off her whitelist.”
“To be honest, man, I think you’re still on her shit-list. That was pretty rough, what you did on the plane… dumping the truth on Timo like that when she had no way out. You know I’m always going to be on your side, but if anyone else did something like that to someone I cared about, I’d never forgive them.”
A few hours later, well into the evening, Clark banged loudly but with futility on the thick basement door. “Come up here,” he yelled into the intercom when he realised his banging wasn’t getting through.
Dan hurried up the stairs and was surprised to see Tara standing at Clark’s shoulder.
“It’s okay, her phone is on the table beside mine,” Clark said. “There’s something we need to talk about.”
Dan closed the door and stepped out of the basement. “Not down there. Dad’s not here, anyway.” He led the way to the couch, staring daggers at Clark for bringing Tara so close to the basement and the secrets within it. “What’s going on?”
“Some weirdo came to my door — Emma’s door — and he left this,” Tara said. She handed Dan a small box with his name and address handwritten on it in neat block capitals.
“What kind of weirdo?” he asked, not overly concerned since it now looked like a case of a birthday gift innocently delivered to the wrong address, rather than someone intentionally targeting Tara as he had initially feared before learning that the package was addressed to him.
She shrugged. “He was on a motorcycle. He had a helmet and everything — you’ll see it on the camera footage. But he didn’t even knock, he just left this box on the doorstep. I heard him arriving, but he was back on the bike by the time I got to the door so he maybe didn’t hear me calling to tell him it was the wrong address. Couriers and delivery guys don’t normally use motorcycles around here, do they?”
“It sounds weird, but they actually do,” Clark replied. “One delivery company, at least. Thanks for bringing this over, Tara, but it’s nothing to worry about.”
She sighed with relief, picking up her phone to leave. “Good. I was hoping it was just a birthday present. So many things are different around here, it’s hard to keep up.”
As soon as the door closed behind her, Dan began to open the box. “Why did you need me for that?” he asked as he ripped the sticky tape from thepackage.
“She wanted to talk to you,” Clark said. “It was easier to just call you up here than to say you were too busy, otherwise she might have wanted to hang around until you weren’t.”
Dan removed the box’s lid and dropped it to the ground. Inside, he saw a torn-up piece of paper.
“What the hell is that?” Clark asked.
Dan immediately tipped the pieces onto the coffee table beside Clark’s phone and turned them all right-side-up. Fortunately there were only nine pieces, so it took him only a few seconds to put them together.
Less fortunately, the content of the handwritten message was highly disconcerting:
‘Three can keep a secret if two of them are dead.’
“That has to be from Walker,” Clark said. “Right?”
“It better be from Walker,” Dan replied. “Because if it’s not…”
Clark picked up his phone then grabbed his car keys and coat. “Come on, man.”
“Seriously? Shouldn’t we tell Emma first, either via Timo or on your phone, like you said?”
“Emma’s not here! Listen, Dan: I’m not going to sit here and let that asshole mess with your head any more than he already has. You can come with me or you can stay here, but I’m going to get some answers — right fucking now.”
Dan stood up and walked to the door.
C minus 44
En route to Stevenson Farm
Eastview, Colorado
Dan held the pieces of the torn-up note in the palm of his clenched fist as Clark began the short drive towards Richard Walker’s farmhouse.
“It has to be from him,” Clark said, sounding very much like he believed his own words and wasn’t just trying to ease Dan’s mind. “You said you met him on Saturday night, so you’re obviously fresh in his mind.”
Dan didn’t say anything. Walker was the only sender who made any kind of sense, and the threatening note itself only really made sense as an attempt to nudge Dan towards revealing the full truth of the hoax. Given Walker’s earlier framing of Full Disclosure as a de facto “emergency stop button” capable of halting what he saw as the GSC’s endless and dangerous power creep, the motive was equally clear.
After just a few songs on the radio, Clark turned off the main road and onto the narrow trail that led to Walker’s cottage. “I haven’t been here since we brought his dog home on our way back from Lolo last year,” he said. “When you were here on Saturday night, did you notice if there were any new security systems?”
Dan shook his head. “I didn’t notice anything when I arrived; I was… you know, not exactly present. But when I left, the main floodlight definitely came on. Same as last year: motion-activated.”
“Okay… well, we’re here to talk to him, anyway, so it’s not like we don’t want him to know we’re coming.” Clark pulled up around sixty feet from the house and took the keys from the car’s ignition. “So how do you want to do this? Walk straight up to the door, or maybe honk the horn so he comes out and knows it’s us? You said he was carrying a shotgun, right?”
“I think he wanted us to come,” Dan said. “If this letter is from him — which it is — it was bait. And if he did want us to come, it’s because he wants to talk to us; not hurt us. Well… he wants to talk to me. I guess he might not be expecting you to be here, so maybe you should wait in the car at first?”
“No way, not happening. I’m coming out there with you when— oh, shit! Dan, get down!”
Dan squinted at the house, trying to see if Clark had been spooked by a sign of the door starting to open or by something else. Clark then forcefully made him lower his head, and after a brief moment of confusion Dan saw the problem.
As problems went, this was a big one: headlights, approaching from behind.
“Who the hell is that?” Clark asked, not exactly expecting Dan to know, either.
Now ducking for cover of his own accord, Dan replied more quietly than necessary: “He said Joe Crabbe is the only other person who knows where he lives. Maybe Crabbe’s just doing his usual supply run? He definitely doesn’t know anything about the hoax.”
“Well whatever he’s doing and whatever he already knows, he’s going to have some questions when he sees the car and comes over to check who’s inside. You think I should drive into the field or something before he gets too close?”
Dan glanced in the wing mirror. “The lights are almost here; he’s already way too close for you to go anywhere without him seeing us.”
Sure enough, within a few more seconds the car was in plain sight. When it came close enough for first the shape and colour and then the license plate to become evident, Dan’s face fell into his hands.
It wasn’t Joe Crabbe.
“What the hell is she doing here?” Clark groaned as Tara stepped out of Emma’s car and walked towards them. “And what the hell are we going to say when she asks us the same thing?”
With no answers and no options, Dan reluctantly rolled down his window as Tara approached.
“Hey,” she said, reaching into her pocket. “I’m glad you weren’t driving somewhere further away. Clark… I picked up your phone from the coffee table. I tracked mine to here; you must have it in your pocket.”
Clark tried to play it cool. He handed over Tara’s phone, an identical model to his own, and made a joke about how he should have known it wasn’t his on account of all the weird calls it kept getting.
“So what are you guys doing out here, anyway?” she asked.
“Uh, this is our uncle’s place,” Clark said. “We always stop by on either of our birthdays.” This immediately struck both him and Dan as the kind of lie that wouldn’t stand up to much scrutiny and would quickly collapse if Tara ever mentioned it in passing to Henry or anyone else, but right now their only concern was that it lasted long enough to get Tara back into Emma’s car.
Fortunately, she bought it.
Unfortunately, it lasted all of the few seconds until a light illuminated the farmhouse’s porch as the door opened and an instantly recognisable figure appeared.
Tara Ford’s mouth fell open. “Clark, that is not your uncle…”
C minus 43
Stevenson Farm
Eastview, Colorado
“Tara, you need to get out of here right now,” Clark said. He didn’t bark it as an order but his tone was as full of urgency as the words themselves. “Listen to me: I know this doesn’t make any sense, but Emma knows what’s going on. He’s not our friend… there’s just something we need to talk to him about.”
Finally, Tara looked away from Richard Walker and into the car. “Damn right it doesn’t make any sense!”
As Walker stood like a statue in the doorway, Rooster dashed out from behind him and bounded towards the car. Tara recoiled despite Dan’s insistence that he was friendly. She calmed down slightly when the dog innocently sniffed around her feet and then Emma’s car, apparently wondering as to the whereabouts of the Ford sister he was already acquainted with.
“You really do need to leave,” Dan said, more softly than Clark’s earlier attempt at making the same point. “We’ll explain everything later, but you’re not safe here. And you can’t tell anyone where we are or who lives here, okay? None of us would be safe if you did. Emma is supposed to be home tomorrow night, so if you can just forget about this until then…”
“Are you coming in or not?” Walker boomed from his doorway.
Dan and Clark both opened their doors to step out of the car.
Tara immediately grasped onto Dan’s arm. “I’m scared,” she said, very simply.
“You should be,” Clark said. “This isn’t a game and that’s why you need to go. But I’ll tell you what, okay? If you go home now, we’ll be there in like… twenty, twenty-five minutes at most. Can you do that?”
Tara nodded quickly and gulped. As her frightened eyes looked away from Clark and into Dan’s, it struck him for the first time that beyond her appearance and sometimes her accent, she really was nothing like Emma. Just like the McCarthy boys, the Ford girls were built for different things; evidently, Tara wasn’t built to handle a situation like this without Emma any more than Dan was without Clark.
Rooster thought about making an attempt to enter Emma’s car when Tara opened the door, but in the end he walked side by side with Dan towards his waiting owner.
“Who was the girl and why was she here?” Walker demanded as they reached the doorstep and the car pulled away.
Clark stepped forward and grabbed Walker’s collar, pressing his nose against the old man’s. “When I want you to talk, you’ll know.”
“Who was the girl and why was she here?” Walker repeated, perfectly parroting his initial tone. “I know it wasn’t Ford, because I know she’s busy cavorting around Europe with Fiore. Kudos for moving on so quickly, Dan.”
“Shut up,” Clark spat at him before briefly turning to Dan. “Ignore him. And as for you, what’s this game you think you’re playing sending stuff to our house? Bringing your shit to our doorstep?”
Walker pulled Clark’s hand off his collar and stepped back, naturally only being able to do so with Clark’s cooperation. He looked at Dan. “I have no idea what he’s talking about.”
“Don’t give me that crap,” Dan said. “No one else could have sent them. I didn’t know the first package was from you until the second one arrived, but then it made sense.”
“What second package?” Walker blurted out, his eyebrows raised. “Uh, what packages?”
Clark let out an exaggeratedly smug laugh and patted Dan on the back. “Nice one, man.”
“Touché, McCarthy,” Walker sighed, not sounding or appearing overly disappointed to have let it slip. “Now come inside and sit down.”
Clark held Dan back. “No.”
“No?”
“Walker, this isn’t a discussion,” Clark said very firmly. “This is a warning. Next time you try to mess with us, I’ll be back here — alone — and there’ll be no more warnings. Got that?”
Walker gave up on Clark and focused solely on Dan. “Just remember what I told you about Full Disclosure,” he said. “You have an emergency stop button, just like I did. President Slater finally said something today. Did you see it? Did you hear it? Did anyone see or hear it? After all that’s happened, all she puts out is a press release reaffirming her support for the GSC’s goals and operations? You see: that’s what we’re up against.”
“Stop talking like we’re on the same side,” Dan snapped. “We’re not allies. You’re the reason my life turned to shit! Your lies are the reason I can’t sleep at night, and now you’re going to stand there and pretend like we’re friends?”
“I didn’t say friends…”
“This is the last thing I’m ever going to say to you,” Dan said, “so I need you to hear it. If we thought that exposing your lies would be good for the world, we would have done it the night we found out. We don’t care about your politics or your grudges or your Cold War power fantasies — why can’t you get that through your head? The reason I live with this every single day is that there would be anarchy if I didn’t!”
“For a time, perhaps,” Walker said. “But things would die down eventually. Heads would roll far beyond the GSC’s walls, granted, but the world would bounce back. It always does.”
Dan shook his head and turned around to leave. There was no sense in trying to discuss it any further; he understood what kind of consequences would come with an exposé of the hoax, even if Walker pretended not to.
He knew that ripping the rug of reality from under the world’s collective feet wasn’t the kind of thing that could be bounced back from so easily — not when people would naturally suspect that their governments and leaders had been in on the double-twist all along. Especially now that the Kerguelen bolide had turned all kinds of planetary threats into water-cooler talk and headline topics, the revelation that society’s elected protectors were either complicit in such a hellish deceit or so complacent as to have been hoodwinked by a godforsaken hoax would lead to burning cities and chaotic uprisings.
Emma had once told Dan that people tended to riot when they were angry rather than scared. More recently, she had impressed upon him the unwelcome point that public order could flat-out collapse if people were suddenly struck with the levels of both which they would feel at the precise moment the hoax ever became public knowledge.
“Who was the guy on the bike that brought the package?” Dan suddenly asked.
“A regular courier,” Walker replied. “Don’t worry; I was careful. The pickup wasn’t here.”
Dan certainly didn’t need any convincing that Walker could keep things under wraps when he had to. Satisfied with that if nothing else, he then turned away and set off towards the car, prompting Rooster to bark in disappointment.
Clark crouched down and patted the dog’s head in a final farewell. “Thanks for your help at Lolo, little guy,” he said. “We won’t forget you.”
Clark then walked away to join Dan in the car.
“Don’t forget me, either,” Walker called after him, a certain spark back in his voice. “I’m not dead yet…”
C minus 42
Ford Residence
Birchwood, Colorado
Unsurprisingly, Tara was waiting outside when Dan and Clark returned home from Stevenson Farm. The confusion on her face was still tinged with fear over who she had seen standing in the doorway, rather than any anger over Clark’s initial lie that they were visiting their uncle or over their refusal to tell her what was going on there and then.
“Well?” she said. “What’s the big secret? How in the hell do you two know where Richard Walker lives… and why in the hell were you there?”
The brothers had already decided how to answer these inevitable questions, having hotly debated it on the short drive home. Clark wanted to say nothing on the matter and simply tell Tara to forget about it until Emma’s arrival back in Birchwood, now only around twenty-four hours away, at which point she could direct any questions to her. Dan, meanwhile, knew that wouldn’t fly. He insisted that they had to talk to Tara for at least a few minutes to make absolutely sure that she understood the importance of staying quiet.
Dan’s idea won out in the end, with Clark reluctantly agreeing to join him in case he accidentally said too much.
“Can we come in?” Dan asked.
Tara immediately opened the door, keen to get some answers and glad that they seemed willing to talk.
A huge projector screen greeted Dan as he stepped inside. It filled the whole height of the wall opposite Emma’s couch and was currently paused on a TV show he recognised. “When did Emma get this?”
“It’s pretty much always been there,” Tara said, pointing to the recess in the ceiling where the screen hid until it was called upon. Two days after arriving from New York, Tara’s previously entrenched habit of hiding her soft southern accent was now a thing of the past. “But I don’t think that really matters right now, do you?”
