Second Contact, page 31
part #2 of Not Alone Series
“Of course,” Emma said. “We’ll be totally open about everything that came after we found out about the hoax. So that’s everything about our direct interaction with the real Messengers; the very same ones whose craft Trey saw and recorded flying over Lolo last night. Remember when you wanted to tell Timo that part without mentioning the hoax… I think you called it a ‘partial tell’ or something like that? Well, that’s the plan with Trey. Make sense?”
“One hundred percent,” Dan confirmed. “We do definitely have to tell him about what happened with the Messengers last year, why Lolo is an important place and how I knew something would happen when it did. But the hoax should stay in a locked box, where it can’t hurt anyone else.”
“And are you happy to be the one who tells him how you knew something was going to happen at Lolo? You know the exact sequence of events better than anyone else.”
Dan nodded again. “But you’ll be listening, right? Ready to jump in if I look like I’m about to say the wrong thing… just like old times?”
“That’s my job,” Emma replied with a slight chuckle.
“And I’m her backup,” Clark said with a grin.
A slowly flashing light on the security centre adjacent to the basement’s stairs then alerted Dan and the others to the arrival of a car. Dan glanced at the camera feed which showed the driveway and saw Trey stepping out of his car.
“Show time,” Timo said.
Dan and Clark rose and hurried upstairs to greet Trey at the front door while the others waited in the basement.
“Hey,” Trey said, immediately aware of Henry McCarthy’s presence by the TV and equally aware that he thus had to watch what he said.
Henry turned around to see who it was. Having been far more surprised to see Timo Fiore earlier in the day, he wasn’t overly interested in the sight of Trey — who he only vaguely recognised — but he did take the opportunity to ask just what the hell they were all doing down there.
“We’re just trying to make sense of what’s been happening,” Dan said. “Trey has his ear to the ground.”
“I try,” Trey said, choosing his words carefully.
“Come across anything interesting lately?” Henry asked.
Trey felt Dan and Clark’s eyes staring at him far more than he felt Henry’s. He thought for a few seconds then shrugged. “It’s difficult to know what to believe.”
“Tell me about it!” Henry said. “Oh, and Clark, don’t forget: the big game is starting soon.”
Clark sent a thumbs-up his father’s way. “Sure thing.”
As Henry turned back to the live pre-game build-up and the trio approached the basement, Emma’s phone began to ring. It sat in the new shelf-like container which Dan had ordered online and installed in a few minutes; it was fully enclosed and compartmentalised so that no one would ever again mix up whose phone was whose, even if the models were identical as was the case with Tara’s and Clark’s.
Emma had asked whether Dan’s ban on phones in the basement was really necessary and, as well as telling her that it was, he reminded her that the physical structure of the basement had been designed to block all telecommunications signals and hence that her phone would have been useless down there even if he let it in.
“Oh yeah, you need to put your phone in here,” Clark told Trey.
Meanwhile, Dan opened the container to grab Emma’s phone then opened the basement door to call down and tell her it was ringing.
“I’m trying to hear this!” Henry groaned from his spot by the TV.
Dan then glanced at the phone’s screen and saw the caller’s name. His expression stiffened immediately.
“What’s up?” Clark asked. “Who is it?”
“I need you to stay down there with Tara and Timo,” Dan replied.
Clark didn’t push for a clearer answer, knowing both that it would come soon enough and that Dan might not want to say it out loud.
“Hold up,” Trey interjected. “Did you just say Timo? Timo Fiore is down there?”
“I said I’m trying to hear this!” Henry repeated, more loudly and less patiently than before.
“You stay with me,” Dan told Trey, ignoring Henry’s irritable complaints.
Emma’s phone stopped ringing just before she reached the top of the stairs. Dan pointed outside, telling her where they should go before returning the call.
“Who was it?” she asked, already walking with Dan as Trey, utterly confused, followed his instruction to go with them.
Dan handed Emma her phone. Then, making sure Henry wouldn’t hear anything, he answered as quietly as he could:
“Jack Neal.”
C minus 23
Jackson High School
Sandalwood, California
While much of the nation’s sporting attention was focused some eighty miles north of the small town of Sandalwood, the local grudge match going on under the lights at Jackson High meant just as much to the kids involved as the big televised game meant to its millionaire participants.
If anything, this finely poised game meant even more to the parents of the players than it did to the players themselves, and the small bleachers were packed with excited families.
Some observers were slightly less excited and interested in the on-field proceedings than others, such as the young girl who paid far less attention to the game than to her alien action figures and the sphere-and-plaque combo toy she had received free with her burger and fries earlier in the afternoon as part of the fast food chain’s link-up with Kaitlyn Judd’s recent movie, The Fourth Plaque.
During a particularly tense passage of play in which her big brother was heavily involved, this young girl pulled on her father’s arm in an attempt to get his attention.
“One minute,” he said, focusing firmly on the game.
The girl was unrelenting. “But Daddy… Daddy, look at the sky. That plane is on fire!”
This caught the man’s attention. He looked up, initially frustrated by the interruption, and his mouth fell open as soon as he saw it. For all the world, it looked like his daughter was right: the brilliant fireball, trail and all, did look passably like a burning plane.
Others had by now spotted the incredible sight and were urgently calling their sons off the field.
The object in the sky wasn’t falling and looked instead like it was passing overhead at tremendous altitude. Some parents reached for their phones to record the incident while others ran down from the bleachers in a second and firmer effort to persuade their focused sons to forget about the game and run for cover.
“Why is the plane on fire?” the young girl asked, fiddling with her sphere-and-plaque toy as she gazed up in wonder.
“It’s not a plane,” her father said as he scooped her up to join the growing mass of players and spectators huddling under the back of the bleachers. “I think it’s a meteor.”
No one knew whether the presumed meteor was going to explode, ala Kerguelen, and no one knew how high it was and how much protection the school’s cheaply constructed bleachers might offer if it shattered into pieces and small meteorites shot to the ground like shards of glass.
“Justin!” the man yelled, calling his son over as the boy slowly meandered off the field with some of his equally blasé teammates.
The teenage boy sulked over, took his helmet off and shook his head in frustration. “That play was going to come off,” he lamented.
“Well I don’t want your head to come off if a meteorite falls onto the field,” his father replied. “The game will restart when it’s safe.”
“When all our momentum is gone,” Justin moaned.
“Maybe the aliens just wanted to see the game?” his little sister suggested.
“Don’t worry, Hayley. It’s not the aliens,” Justin said, lowering himself to her level and speaking gently. He then looked at his father and raised his eyebrows twice, silently but clearly encouraging him to say something to the same effect.
“Yeah,” their father said after a long pause, during which the commotion of countless frightened families cowering under the bleachers filled the silence. “It’s probably not the aliens.”
C minus 22
McCarthy Residence
Birchwood, Colorado
As soon as she was safely outside and Dan had closed the door behind himself and Trey, Emma returned Jack Neal’s call.
“You should hear this,” she said to Trey as it rang. “This is going to illustrate why no one else can ever see what you recorded at Lolo.”
Trey couldn’t hide his confusion but he didn’t speak, respecting the finger Emma held up to indicate that Jack had answered the call. She then beckoned Trey and Dan over with her hand, so they could listen in.
“Emma, I won’t waste your time,” Jack began. “I’m just going to tell you this straight up: we know that you and Timo were behind the timing of the GSC leak and John wants in on whatever else you have on Godfrey. He knows you must have something and he’s willing to compensate you for it in whichever way you desire, but we’re already getting to the point that he’s telling me to feel free to use negative leverage to get it out of you. John isn’t someone who holds back on the stick when the carrot doesn’t work, Emma. He doesn’t follow the same kind of playbook as the people we’re used to dealing with.”
Emma rolled her eyes. “Is this the part when I’m supposed to be scared? You’re already wasting my time, Jack. I don’t give a rat’s ass how desperate your master is for info on Godfrey or how much trouble you’ll be in when you go back to him with nothing, but I sure as hell don’t appreciate your threats and I sure as hell have better things to do than play your stupid games. So if that’s all you called for, this conversation is over.”
“I didn’t make any threats but I do need you to understand that John isn’t playing around,” Jack said. “And Emma, you really shouldn’t assume that we don’t have anything on Godfrey. You know me better than that.”
“I’ll tell you what I know,” Emma said firmly. “If you had anything that could hurt Godfrey, you would already have done one of those transparently fake ‘leaks’ you’ve been doing for the last six months.”
Jack laughed slightly. Emma knew him well enough to know that it was a defensive laugh. “Don’t believe everything you hear,” was all he said in reply.
“Oh, don’t worry about that,” Emma retorted. “When it’s coming from you, I don’t believe any of it.”
Emma had long known better than to trust a word Jack said, but his recent penchant for brazen duplicity had only served to sharpen her scepticism.
For in recent times, Jack Neal and John Cole had become somewhat obsessed with the tactic of releasing beneficial information in the form of ‘leaks’ which they pretended to resent. They weren’t the only leaders to have used such tactics since having seen how ravenous the public’s appetite for the IDA leak had proven, but unlike other less media-savvy individuals they at least seemed to understand that the subject matter of a leak and the manner of its release were both crucial factors.
The recent GSC leak, facilitated by Emma and Timo, had been by far the biggest of the year largely because its content mattered to people, but the timing — coming as it did during a live Focus 20/20 broadcast from which William Godfrey had nowhere to run — made it all the more impactful.
Cole had likewise managed to gain much-needed political capital on several occasions, usually when he was struggling with some domestic crisis or another, by arranging his own ‘leaks’ with content certain to generate enough headlines and social media chatter to be worthwhile.
The most famous recent example was the “string them up and feed them to the dogs” case, when anti-Cole British newspapers had splashed that very headline across their front pages without realising that this was exactly what Jack and Cole wanted them to do.
Despite the many inconsistencies of his often pliable positions, John Cole was extremely and unwaveringly tough on crime, and terrorism in particular. Unlike most of his positions, this wasn’t something he had to pretend to believe in; Jack’s work in this regard was usually related to making sure Cole didn’t say anything too strong in the wrong context.
But during a particularly difficult few days amid a party conference at which some junior ministers had been whispering to the press about their dissatisfaction with Cole’s leadership, Jack tactically leaked a recording of Cole addressing party strategists. As well as making it look like Cole had been the target of the kind of sniping that made the public hate career-minded politicians so much, both the content of Cole’s private comments and the media storm which followed strengthened his position among his support base.
The subject was an easy one for him: terrorism. In a discussion about the deft touch needed in extending policing powers, an issue which was already in the headlines after the last-minute foiling of a large terrorist attack which had been plotted by a suspect who’d been released by police just weeks earlier when they had been unable to justify extending his detention, Cole stormed into a rage at the “soft touch” approach desired by too many of his colleagues. It was at that point that he uttered his now infamous words: “Next time, I don’t want the bastards to be released… I want them strung up! Hung, drawn and quartered! String them up and feed them to the dogs… alive. That’ll teach the rest of them. A deterrent is what these animals need, not a bloody lawyer and a court order to set them free!”
When the predictable demands for an apology came, Cole stood firm. His instincts were consistent with Jack’s advice; more than anything else, the public hated weakness. This episode also enabled Cole to present himself as the victim of machiavellian infighting as well as affording him the opportunity to attack his opponents for being more concerned with the delicacy of their words than the decisiveness of their actions.
The success of that faux leak prompted several more, some of which were so obviously orchestrated that Emma couldn’t understand how the British press kept falling for them. She could only think that Cole’s opponents were too worried about being painted as crazed meta-conspiracy theorists, as they may well have been had they suggested that Jack was behind any of the ‘leaks’ which always looked at first like they would hurt Cole but invariably ended up helping him.
The fact that there had been no leaks of any description in the last few days about Cole’s relationship with Godfrey or anything else of that nature told Emma one thing: Jack had nothing.
Godfrey was down and it didn’t take a genius to know that Cole would have loved nothing more than to kick him hard enough to make sure he could never get back up, so his failure to do so very strongly suggested an inability to do so.
“Like I said…” Jack groaned down the phone, filling a lingering silence and trying to sound less frustrated than he was. “We know that you and Timo played a part in getting the truth about Kerguelen from those GSC scientists who wrote the memo. And since the two of you obviously have contacts in Buenos Aires, we know you must have something else.”
“Must we?” Emma asked, making no effort to hide her contempt.
“So you’re actually telling me you have nothing?”
“I have nothing for you,” she qualified.
Dan watched on uneasily as Emma dealt with Jack. He knew, courtesy of her, how important it was to never convey weakness when dealing with people like Jack, but her current confrontational approach wasn’t one he was overly comfortable with.
Emma, for her part, was going easy. In preparation for Timo’s appearance alongside Jack on Focus 20/20 the previous weekend, she had warned him that it was both unwise and dangerous to try to take the high road against the likes of Jack and Cole.
Her words had been stark: “Because while you’re taking the high road, they’ll be busy crawling through the sewers like the rats they are, planting TNT underneath the foundations of your existence. If you don’t get down there with them and stop them before they do what they set out to do, they win. It’s as simple and as dirty as that.”
On this occasion she was merely having to respond to Jack’s requests for information with firm rejections — there was no need for any dirty tactics yet — but keeping her composure was absolutely crucial.
“John isn’t going to like this,” Jack said.
Emma tried not to laugh. “Jack… for all I care, Cole can take a long walk off a short pier.”
Trey couldn’t help but laugh quietly at that, while Dan smiled despite still feeling uneasy.
“Is this really the way you want it to be?” Jack asked. “After all we’ve both been through… after all we’ve been through, you want to let Godfrey win?”
Emma rolled her eyes for the second time in the conversation, this time almost sending them to the top of her head in reaction to Jack’s kindergarten-level attempt at persuasive psychology and even more so at his pathetically desperate “after all we’ve been through” line.
But moments later, instead of a reply, she uttered a sharp and sudden cry of pain.
Emma’s phone fell from her hand and she crouched to the ground in agony. At her side, Dan also doubled over in pain with one hand on the back of his neck.
“What’s going on? Are you guys okay?” Trey asked, panicking at the mysterious suddenness of whatever was hurting them and with no clue as to what was going on. He then yelled much more loudly: “I need some help out here!”
Through a pained grimace, Dan’s eyes were the first to reopen.
Trey focused then on Emma, who seemed to be feeling whatever she was feeling a lot more acutely than Dan was. “Emma, what do you want me to do?” he asked. “Is this something to do with—?”
“Shut up!” Dan blurted out. With one hand still on his neck, he reached for Emma’s fallen phone with the other and disconnected the call.
“I… I’m okay,” Emma said.
“It’s nothing to worry about,” Dan added to ease Trey’s worry while he himself was concerned by how much Jack had heard but relieved that he at least hadn’t heard any more. He then moved to help Emma, whose eyes were now fully open again having been tightly closed during the sharpest moments of the intense short-lived pain in her neck.
