Second Contact, page 23
part #2 of Not Alone Series
Clark tried to make some small talk about the show — American Treasure — which he watched fairly often and knew more about than Dan. Ironically enough, the show starred a familiar team of Australians who Dan knew better from their earlier show, Treasure Trawl Titans, in which they travelled the world in pursuit of lost treasure. Their production company, 3-T, had first come to his attention when he saw its name on one of the letters in the infamous folder he discovered outside the IDA building.
With an attention to detail typical of their incredible hoax, Richard Walker’s ally Hans Kloster had sent a letter to 3-T warning them against diving in Lake Toplitz — the supposed site of the alien discovery made by Kloster and his Nazi colleagues in 1938 — due to the presence of “volatile materials” in the lake’s depths. There were no volatile materials, of course; but like so many other carefully scattered breadcrumbs, Kloster’s correspondence with 3-T went on to add weight to the lie that he and Walker so successfully dressed up as a secret.
Indeed, that letter had been sent a full eight years before Walker initiated the leak sequence by dumping a folder full of fake evidence on the street for an unsuspecting Dan McCarthy to stumble upon, and the breadcrumb technique played an undeniable role in making the hoax look like a dedicated long-term cover-up.
In American Treasure, the guys from 3-T ditched their high-risk explorations and instead travelled around the United States looking for rare finds in unlikely places. It was very much geared to an Australian audience but was always respectful of the history, culture and traditions of everyday Americans and their small-town communities, which made it a hit on American TV, too. The show had a warm low-key feel compared to its more glitzy American-made equivalents, with less of the faux-drama and the heartbeat-style sound effects.
“I didn’t know you liked stuff like American Treasure,” Clark said, pointing to the giant screen whose currently paused image showed one of the 3-T guys assessing some vintage advertising signs. “I don’t think I’ve seen this one.”
Tara picked up a remote control from the couch and pressed a button which first killed the picture and then caused the screen to roll up and disappear into its impressively concealed ceiling-based recess. “That’s not exactly what I want to talk about,” she said.
“Emma will be home tomorrow night,” Clark replied, very flatly.
Tara threw up her hands. “And? I saw you two at Richard Walker’s house tonight! I want to know what’s going on!”
“You think you do,” Dan interjected. “This is the kind of thing that you might think you want to know, but as soon as you did, you would wish you didn’t. Trust me: you wouldn’t thank me for dropping this on you.”
“So you admit that there’s a secret, and I’m supposed to thank you for keeping it from me?”
“It’s not like that,” Clark said. “Until Emma gets back, we’re in over our heads. It’s hard enough with two of us… and three wouldn’t be easier, it would be harder. Don’t bother Emma tonight, either; her and Timo have been trying to fit about four days worth of media stuff into one day and one night, so she can’t deal with this right now. Just know that Walker isn’t a threat to us. The only threat we’d face is if you tell anyone where he is, or especially that we were there.”
Tara turned to Dan, dissatisfied with Clark’s comments but looking like a new thought had just entered her head. “Is that where you were the other night? When I caught you outside, coming back from somewhere?”
Dan hesitated long enough for her to draw her own conclusions.
“You walked all that way?” she went on. “Why would you walk?”
Dan gulped. “It’s complicated. Please just wait until Emma gets home, okay? If I told you any more, I doubt she’d ever speak to me again. And it’s not like you’re the only person who we have to keep in the dark here; you already know more than anyone else. Not even my dad knows anything about Walker living there, let alone how we know or why we would ever go there.”
“Okay…” Tara began, “but here’s the thing: I do know that he lives there, and I want to know how you know and why you went there.”
“Come on, man,” Clark said, opening the door as he unilaterally decided that it was time to go. “We’re not getting anywhere and she already knows how dangerous it would be to tell anyone about any of this.”
Dan was left face-to-face with Tara. “We would all be in worse trouble than you could ever imagine. And Emma will be home tomorrow,” he said, leaving it at that.
Tara sighed, her expression now more disappointed than anything else. “Friends keep each other’s secrets, Dan. Friends don’t keep secrets from each other.”
“Friends don’t burden friends with secrets like this one,” he replied, slowly following Clark outside. “Trust me.”
C minus 41
Cavalieri Observatory
Trento, Italy
As the sun rose in Italy, an exhausted Emma Ford sat with an equally exhausted member of staff at Timo Fiore’s flagship observatory. Alessandro Bonucci, a charming young astronomer with a flowing mane of jet-black hair, was even more glad of a break from the cameras than she was.
Unusually for Alessandro, he had spent much of the day being wheeled out at Timo’s side to answer technical questions from the press during a whirlwind tour of media engagements.
Now, while Timo was dealing with some final administrative details before heading to Colorado for the foreseeable future, Emma and Alessandro were relaxing in the facility’s ring-shaped lookout tower.
Alessandro had suggested this spot, keen to show Emma the vast array of radio telescopes visible from one side of the tower. Once there, he fondly recounted Clark’s comment of the previous year: that the view made it look like the facility’s staff were “growing a crop of giant satellite dishes.”
He then led Emma to the other side of the tower for a look at the awe-inspiring “Big One”, whose 400-metre diameter now only earned it a place as the second largest radio telescope in the world but whose sheer size still made it a truly incredible sight to behold.
Despite being nowhere near as much of a space enthusiast as Dan, Emma didn’t have to feign interest as she asked what kind of findings the telescopes on both sides of the tower enabled.
Alessandro was happy to answer this but was unsurprised when Emma’s attention quickly turned to the more topical and headline-grabbing subject of what kind of progress had been made at the observatory’s sister facilities which focused more excitingly on the search for previously undetected exoplanets. She didn’t need to say the words “New Kerguelen” for Alessandro to read between the lines; by now, he was very accustomed to addressing similar queries.
He sounded less happy when it came time to answer the exoplanet question, because the answer wasn’t one he liked. “We are still making discoveries, but things on that front have become very difficult,” he said. Like Emma remembered, Alessandro spoke perfect English but with an accent many times more pronounced than Timo’s. “Because as you know, we no longer have access to any space-based telescopes or any official access to data from those who do, which makes confirmation and classification much more difficult than it should be. The old way of doing things has gone out the window; now, if someone makes an observation through a GSC telescope — which is to say any telescope formerly controlled by any public space agency — their observations are no longer shared with anyone outside of that system. We do have state-of-the-art ground-based equipment, and some of our sister facilities are focused squarely on the search for distant planets, but like I said: politics is getting in the way.”
“Do you personally see all the data from Timo’s other observatories?” Emma asked.
Alessandro, now sitting with his legs resting on a control console overlooking the Big One, put his hands behind his head and nodded a few times. “Yes, of course; whenever I want to access their data, I can do so. And more than that, I can remotely control the equipment at some of our dark-sky locations from here.”
“So if we knew where to look for something, you’d be able to find it?”
Alessandro turned his head without moving his chair, keen to face Emma who was still standing. “Emma… do you know something I don’t?”
“I know a lot of things you don’t,” she replied light-heartedly, “just like you know a lot of things I don’t. But I don’t know anything about this, no. I’m just wondering, with the GSC’s monopoly on space-based observation, whether or not we’d be able to see something if they wanted to keep it quiet.”
“What kind of something?”
She shrugged. “I dunno, let’s say they spot a candidate for New Kerguelen and the location leaks out. That hasn’t happened, by the way; I’m just spitballing. But if it did happen and if we knew where to look, would we be able to see it, too?”
“That question has as many variables as the sky has stars,” Alessandro said, looking back down at the colossal radio telescope that had so totally captured Dan’s imagination a year earlier. “But in all honesty… this GSC monopoly has been in operation for a year, give or take a few weeks, but with the way things are going, I can’t see it lasting another year. Can you? I know a lot of astronomers, as you can imagine, and no one is happy. This is politics trampling on science, which is something scientists don’t like. When Fiore Frontiere is up and running, there will be a stampede of the best minds in countless disciplines — because whatever Godfrey and the rest say about Timo, and whatever people think about him, he has a well-earned reputation for staying out of the way. He pays the bills and he would always have the final say if there was any kind of argument, but he lets us do our thing. So on one side we have a globalist public body restricting its employees, and on the other side we have Timo doubling their salaries and offering total freedom. And, and…”
Alessandro tapped a touchscreen on the control console and navigated through a few menu screens until a series of photographs appeared.
“Then we have this,” he continued, pointing to images from some of the day’s anti-GSC protests around the world. “The GSC’s leadership is reeling. Kerguelen has exposed them. More to the point, their attempt to push what really happened at Kerguelen under the carpet has exposed them. But that’s not to say that this many people would be out on the street if Timo and Billy had not dived head-first into their discussion on planetary defence during the show in New York. When people know they’re being kept in the dark about some general thing, they have an abstract opposition to that. But when people feel like their leaders aren’t doing enough to keep them safe from something, that is visceral. To be honest, Emma, I am not overly supportive of the idea of spreading fear, but in the spur of the moment — coming straight after the leak of the memo about Kerguelen likely being an unnatural event — I can see why Timo and Billy used the topic of planetary defence to twist the knife into Godfrey. Did you plan that? When Timo took things in that direction and stayed there for several minutes, was he working to a strategy you devised?”
Emma shook her head and belatedly took a seat in the empty chair next to Alessandro at the Big One’s side of the lookout tower. “One look at those pictures shows that it’s working out for us,” she said. “But no… I didn’t plan for the discussion to go that way and I didn’t want the discussion to go that way. I don’t like talking about that stuff because I don’t like thinking about that stuff. But from where I was sitting it seemed like Timo had too many specific talking points for me to believe he was winging it on the spot. He must have been thinking about saying it. Does he ever talk to you about any of that stuff?
“This is a radio observatory and my work is here,” Alessandro said, “so I don’t usually deal with anything quite as exciting as any of that. Does Dan have much interest in this kind of thing?”
The door on the lookout tower’s cylindrical elevator then slid open, seconds before Timo announced his arrival with a loud clap of his hands. “At last,” he said with a relieved sigh. “At last, everything is taken care of. Alessandro, you have earned the day off, for sure. But Emma… I am afraid we are not so lucky; we have a long drive to our final engagements and then a longer drive back to Milan for our flight. Unfortunately we really do have to make a move. I hope you two weren’t talking about anything too exciting.”
“We had just started talking about Dan,” Alessandro said.
Timo couldn’t hide his delight. “So you’re back on speaking terms?” he asked Emma.
“I haven’t spoken to him since Denver,” she replied, rising to her feet with more than a little annoyance at Timo for asking this in front of Alessandro, who then asked the natural question:
“Is something wrong between you and Dan?”
Emma glared at Timo, silently telling him that his mouth had gotten them into this corner and that it could get them out of it.
Timo waved his hand to dismiss it as a trivial point. “A trifling thing. It’ll be forgotten by the time we land, won’t it, Emma?”
“Good luck with the planet-hunting,” she said to Alessandro, ignoring Timo altogether. “I’ll let you know if we get any new info that could help out with that.”
“You mean from the GSC?” he replied.
“Or somewhere else,” she said, stepping into the elevator and sending a wink Alessandro’s way. “Who knows?”
C minus 40
10 Downing Street
London, England
Jack Neal arrived back in London expecting a reasonably warm reception from John Cole. Within seconds of seeing Cole’s face, however, he realised he should have known better.
Cole pointed to the desk, at an open newspaper. A cartoon filled the top section of the page, showing both himself and Jack Neal as poodles trying to hump Timo Fiore’s leg while Timo shooed them away with a newspaper.
“Explain,” Cole said.
Jack hesitated. “Uh, do you want me to explain what it means?”
“I know what it means, you idiot! I want you to explain why you put us in a position to look like… this! I want to know why the people who the public adore — Fiore, and by extension Ford and the McCarthys — now look like our opponents.”
“I thought Timo would be too focused on Godfrey to pay much attention to us,” Jack said in an open and almost vulnerable tone, “and even then, I didn’t think the attention he’d pay would be so critical. But Emma had him drilled to keep distancing himself from us whenever I tried to back him up, every single time. Even though Timo is attacking Godfrey at the same time we are, with Emma’s attitude being what it is there’s just no way for us to bring them onside or even make them look indifferent to us. She wants to be against us.”
“Are you telling me there’s no way to bring them onside, or that you can’t do it?”
Jack hesitated.
“Or…” Cole went on, “are you telling me she’s always going to tell him to distance himself from us precisely because we are an us? After all, you’re the one they all hate.”
“Boss, the panel went better than you think it did. Look at the protests! Look at Slater being forced to come out against us and in defence of an organisation the world hates! The core of this narrative is the GSC, which people hate, and right now we are defined in opposition to it. That’s the right place to be. Forget about those fools in Birchwood for now. You saw Godfrey squirming when the leak about the bolide came out; that was a powerful moment.”
“And you’re taking credit for it?” Cole scoffed. “Tell me, Jack: since it was quite obvious from Timo’s face that he and Ford were involved in the reveal, why the hell was she able to find that memo before you? You want to talk about powerful moments, well I wouldn’t have minded flashing that bloody memo to the photographers outside before anyone else had seen it!”
Jack sat down uneasily. “I have friends in Beijing, in Moscow, and in seats of power all around the world. Fiore will sometimes get things like this before us because he has friends in observatories. Which kind of friends and contacts would you prefer?”
“Both!” Cole roared, pounding his fist on the desk and angered as much by Jack’s insolence as his failings. “And it sounds like what you’re really telling me here is that Fiore has Ford while I’m stuck with you. She has the same kind of friends you have, and she knows how to make the most of her client’s contacts, too. That seems to be the difference, doesn’t it?”
“But boss, with respect… what contacts do you have that I don’t?”
Cole stood silently for several seconds. “Respect? You’re going to sit in my office and address me in that tone, and then you’re going to talk to me about respect?”
Jack struggled to maintain eye contact.
“You’re here because no one else will have you,” Cole said, very flatly. “Don’t think I don’t know that, and don’t think I don’t understand what this is. None of your precious friends in Beijing or Moscow would ever truly trust an American and you’d be just about as welcome in Washington or Buenos Aires as you would be in Birchwood. You’re here because you’re addicted to the scent of power and because I’m the most powerful man who’ll have you. And do you want to know why I wanted you here, Jack, instead of settling for the procession of robotic spin doctors in London who love the scent just as much?”
Jack stayed quiet and didn’t make any obvious gestures, correctly assuming that he wasn’t supposed to answer.
Cole continued: “Because ever since I got into this game, all I heard about Jack Neal was that he was the man who was prepared to do the things that other men weren’t. Back when you were with Slater and even in the time you spent with Godfrey, no job was too dirty for those little hands of yours. But now?”
“Give it one more day to see how this plays out,” Jack said, not quite pleading but not far from it. “The writing is on the wall for Godfrey and Slater is going to look weak for having backed him. This is like last year when Godfrey got on the right side at the very beginning by backing McCarthy… remember? Remember how you were the only person who stepped forward to tell him that was a good idea? And this time you’re the one who got on the right side first. Slater is hedging her bets, and we’re all-in. You know how this story ends.”
