Second Contact, page 6
part #2 of Not Alone Series
For like Cole, Jack Neal now bore a grudge against William Godfrey; and as Cole had always known, a powerful ally with a shared enemy was the best friend a boy could have.
“My only concern is what happens if the media pull McCarthy back into the picture,” Cole said. “Everyone else we can predict and deal with, but what if he gets pulled into this and chooses the wrong side? Do we have any emergency ammo there like we do for Godfrey and Slater?”
“Don’t worry about that, boss,” Jack said with a sycophantic wink. “We don’t have much ammo to hurt McCarthy himself… but as long as Emma Ford stays by his side in Birchwood, I’ll have a million times more than we could ever need.”
C minus 89
McCarthy Residence
Birchwood, Colorado
Upstairs, Emma sat pensively at the kitchen table while Clark rooted around in the refrigerator.
Her eyes kept being drawn to the back door at the far end of the room, the same door that Ben Gold had desperately pounded on the night of the DS-1 launch disaster when he arrived to tell Dan that Richard Walker had lied about everything and had just mysteriously disappeared.
Ben went on to kill himself later that night, and for a horrible while Emma had feared that Dan might do something similar. It all worked out okay after Lolo and she hadn’t thought about any of it in a long time, but this night’s events — and particularly the discussion topics that followed — brought it all back only too clearly.
This was the first time Emma and Clark had been alone together in a while, as both were always busy with work and didn’t normally have all that much to talk about. Both were much closer to Dan than to each other, but they were bound for life by a common bond that no one else but him could ever understand.
As Clark gleefully tucked in to a huge plate of wings, Emma couldn’t help but notice that he’d put on more than a few pounds. He was big enough to hold them pretty well, but Emma knew that if he was still in the public eye there would have been plenty of magazines and gossip websites picking up on it with close-up pictures and snide captions highlighting the offending areas around his cheeks and his jawline. Having seen herself mocked more than once for having a few hairs out of place on a windy day, she knew how it went.
When Emma first arrived in Birchwood, the fact that Clark and more importantly Dan were relatively presentable had made her initial job slightly easier than it might have been. The intervening year hadn’t been nearly as kind to Clark’s appearance as Dan’s, partly since Dan’s original hairstyle and general presentation allowed so much room for refinement, but largely because of Clark’s complacency surrounding the fact that the physical demands of his police career didn’t come close to those of his earlier military days and private security work. And although both were the kind of men who were occasionally described as handsome in passing when being discussed for more important reasons, neither regularly had their looks highlighted up front.
No one had ever spoken or written of “Emma Ford and her handsome client” in the way they’d often spoken and written of “Dan McCarthy and his bombshell PR guru,” for instance, but new paparazzi pictures of Dan which featured in semi-frequent ‘Where Is He Now?’-type articles did tend to include captions complimenting his recent appearance.
“Are you worried about him?” Clark asked very suddenly, mid-mouthful rather than between mouthfuls. “You look worried.”
Emma pulled her eyes away from the door. “Are you?”
Clark appeared to think deeply about this for several seconds, as though he hadn’t expected the simple question to be turned back on him. Eventually, he shook his head very slightly. “He’s not going to tell anyone anything.”
“But are you worried about him?” Emma asked. “You know, his state of mind? If he’d shown me that whiteboard yesterday, I would’ve been seriously concerned. You said it: that stuff about Heilig and his family did look like something you’d find in a serial killer’s place.”
“But he didn’t show us it yesterday,” Clark said. “He showed us it tonight, right after something weird as hell happened in the most conspicuous place it could have possibly happened. So what do you think now?”
It was Emma’s turn to hesitate. “I think we need to support him without getting his hopes up too much… and especially without putting any ideas into his head about telling anyone else what we know. He’s just so unselfish,” she said, almost sighing out what should have sounded like a compliment. “Sometimes I don’t think he understands what would happen to us if it ever got out that we’ve known about Walker’s lies for this long without exposing them. Obviously that’s nowhere near the worst bad thing that would happen in that scenario, but it is one bad thing. We would be absolute pariahs. Our lives would be over.”
“There’s no sense in worrying about something that’s never going to happen,” Clark said, clearing his plate in near-record time. “The secret’s safe with Dan… every little bit of it.”
C minus 88
Port-aux-Francais Research Station
La Grande Terre, Kerguelen Islands
Over the course of a painfully long hour, Billy Kendrick had spoken only a few times to the GSC Security Corps officers who were holding him in the eerily quiet room where he had been entertaining his tour group just a short while earlier.
“You idiots have no more authority to call the shots on the whole of this island than you would to call the shots in the whole state of Florida,” he snapped after several failed attempts to get any information out of them. “Having a few staff in a space-related research station doesn’t mean that everything else in the vicinity of that station falls under your control!”
The men ignored these comments as totally as they had ignored every other before them, leading Billy to reluctantly resign himself to the fact that all he could do was wait for someone smarter than these idiots to show up. As yet he had seen no activity on the other side of the room’s window, through which the incredible bolide had announced its arrival earlier in the morning.
Billy was starting to strongly suspect that the GSC staff on the island were as clueless as he was about what would happen next, and that the organisation’s top brass had probably told the grunts on the ground to keep him under close observation until further notice. He imagined that such notice would come at the moment when someone with a brain finally realised that he didn’t know anything about the bolide that hadn’t already gone around the world via dozens of recordings made by his tourists and the island’s resident researchers, but there were still no clues as to how far away that moment might be.
The two officers in the room weren’t even looking at Billy, and he felt confident that he could have easily made it to the door and ran outside had there been anywhere to run. Unfortunately there wasn’t, since without ground transport there would be no easy way back to the safety of his ship and the friendly faces of his many tourists.
Just as his boredom was building to a level of physical discomfort, such feelings long having replaced annoyance and fear as his primary state of being, a large wired telephone to Billy’s left began to emit a dim red flash.
It wasn’t ringing out loud, but a call was definitely coming in. The men, paying no attention, were none the wiser.
The building Billy was sitting in had nothing to do with the French National Centre for Space Studies, and as such was supposed to be free from direct GSC oversight. The officers also had radios strapped to their waists, so Billy thought that whoever was calling was more likely to be friendly than hostile, and quite possibly someone from the ship who knew which building and room he’d been inside when the meteor arrived.
Nothing to lose, he thought, reaching slowly towards the still-flashing handset.
He trod a careful a line between being quick enough to answer before the caller gave up and being subtle enough to not startle the observers until he had the phone in his hand and could reveal that he was being held against his will.
Billy shifted his chair slightly and reached further.
Just a little further…
The two men began to laugh heartily at a joke Billy didn’t hear, both of them looking the other way and paying even less attention than before.
Almost there…
C minus 87
McCarthy Residence
Birchwood, Colorado
Fed up of listening to uninformed speculation about the Kerguelen bolide and fed up of hearing second-hand analysis of footage he could see as clearly as the people discussing it, Dan decided to try and get a first-hand report from someone who had witnessed the incredible event for themselves.
He reached across his desk and picked up the telephone, which was wired to a line upstairs like all other connections in the signal-blocking basement. With the phone in his hand, Dan dialled the long number he’d been given by Billy Kendrick many months earlier.
It rang and rang until eventually someone on the ship answered. It wasn’t Billy, but rather a member of the crew who kindly agreed to transfer Dan to the building where Billy was supposed to be. The crew member told Dan that she didn’t know if Billy was still there or not, since there had been no contact from his group since the bolide. She didn’t sound concerned about this, adding that she’d been told the island was under lockdown to make sure everyone was safe and that they’d all be reunited before too long.
And so it was that Dan once again sat with the phone to his ear as it rang, and rang, and rang… and stopped.
The silence on the line wasn’t total; it definitely sounded like someone had picked up.
“Billy?” Dan asked, very tentatively.
“Dan?! Is that you?” Billy replied, his voice loud but distant.
Another distant voice then entered the fray, this time one Dan didn’t recognise. It echoed Billy’s: “Dan? Dan McCarthy?”
The man’s accent sounded European, maybe Dutch, but Dan couldn’t be sure. He was equally unsure of the more important question: who was he?
A third individual provided the answer only too soon; much louder and much closer.
“This is GSC Security Corps Kerguelen Command,” his gruff voice boomed. “State the reason for your call.”
Dan didn’t speak; his mouth was frozen.
“Mr McCarthy, state the reason for your call!”
Once again, Dan’s voice failed him. He didn’t know what was going on and wouldn’t have known what to say even if he’d been able to speak. Try as he might, all attempts to force out a reply came up short.
“Don’t worry, Dan; I’m safe,” Billy called, still distant. “I have over a hundred international tourists and a full crew sitting on a ship on the other side of this island. Godfrey’s blackshirts can’t keep me here for long. Don’t worry about me, Dan. I’ll be out of here soo—”
Mid-word, the line went flat.
Helplessly listening to the uncomfortable sound of a dead tone from a basement on the other side of the world, all Dan could do was hope that Billy was right.
THURSDAY
C minus 86
White House
Washington, D.C.
For several hours, President Valerie Slater steadfastly resisted growing calls to issue an official comment regarding the Kerguelen bolide.
Like other leaders, Slater was a strong public supporter of the GSC. But just like those same other leaders, she hadn’t missed the general feelings of resentment that had been building among her citizenry towards Chairman Godfrey’s organisation.
As laid out in the New York Agreement, signed at the United Nations to create the GSC a year earlier, non-intervention from national leaders was a foundational principle of the truly supranational organisation and was utterly required for Godfrey’s position to retain the authority and credibility necessary to keep so many moving parts in check. There had never been anything like the GSC, which had already structurally consumed all former national space agencies and now exercised arms-length control of their daily operations while setting the broader agenda and working towards total integration, and a united front among the governments of its member states was something of which they all understood the importance.
Internally, many in Slater’s government considered the most important result of the New York Agreement to be that China’s near-term space ambitions had been halted. Few, however, had much confidence that the GSC would be around to hold back the Chinese plans for a lunar colony and Martian research base for very long; indeed, many held tremendous scepticism that the GSC would exist in even a decade’s time.
Balancing the competing national agendas of the GSC’s primary member states and handling truculent populist leaders from elsewhere was a difficult task and one that few expected any willing candidate other than William Godfrey could ever prove capable of performing. And since the GSC’s charter restricted any individual to only one single five-year term as Chairman, many expected that the post-Godfrey leadership contest would inevitably descend into mud-slinging which would bring to the surface all of the latent divisions that Godfrey alone could control.
Only one year into its life, President Slater had been strongly advised to begin preparing for life after the GSC. China and Russia would already be doing the same, she was told, and the subject of a joint venture between private enterprise and the public sector was one that interested many in Washington and beyond as a way for the United States to regain top spot in an era when blowing China out of the water with public investment alone was no longer a feasible or realistic proposition.
Slater had already received countless requests for a few minutes of face-to-face time since the Kerguelen bolide, with some anti-GSC interests calling for her to twist the knife into Godfrey over the lack of advance warning and others more simply stating that the incident served as a reminder of the foolishness of ceding sovereignty over any security-related matters to a supranational organisation. Of course, the security experts who made the latter point and suggested how Slater should respond to the bolide didn’t need to worry about the extremely delicate politics of the GSC.
And, as if it was needed, reports that an American citizen had been forcefully detained by GSC Security Corps personnel led to even greater calls for an official comment. It didn’t matter that the citizen in question was Billy Kendrick, a man widely detested in political circles for his tireless attempts to find a conspiracy in everything he ever saw — all that mattered was that GSC goons had roughed up an innocent American civilian.
More than any celestial event, this was the kind of thing that made it difficult for President Slater to stay quiet. A bipartisan call for condemnation ultimately pushed her into authorising a simple statement which expressed great concern at the precedent but took care to remind everyone that Billy Kendrick wasn’t just any old tourist and that a research base on an isolated island wasn’t just any old place; the incident wasn’t as black and white as a plethora of headlines were making out, Slater said, and that was an important point to bear in mind.
This kind of deft touch in the face of loud voices calling for strong responses to relatively minor issues of the moment had kept Slater high in the polls and out of any major controversies over the past year, allowing her reputation to recover from the horrendous few months after the IDA leak.
Slater couldn’t help but notice that Dan McCarthy had also stayed quiet about Kerguelen so far, keeping himself out of the public eye as he had consistently tried to do for so long. McCarthy’s willingness to move on from some unsavoury incidents and keep to the fringes showed Slater that he was more mature than she’d initially believed. She also knew, however, that his sensible restraint was likely to be at least partially attributable to the influence of Emma Ford, who the President begrudgingly recognised as a potent message-manager.
The celestially intriguing and politically unfortunate incidents at Kerguelen, while admittedly newsworthy, weren’t in themselves anything that posed much immediate difficulty for President Slater. But amid whispers that early observation data seen by American GSC personnel was already raising eyebrows about the bolide’s true nature, she wasn’t foolish enough to think that things weren’t quickly going to get a whole lot more complicated.
C minus 85
Garden of the Gods Park
Colorado Springs, Colorado
An excited ACN reporter stood in front of a spectacular sunrise next to the equally spectacular Balanced Rock, a worthy backdrop for everything from a Kaitlyn Judd movie poster to the sun-faded family photo which had survived several changes of refrigerators to remain a constant feature of the McCarthys’ kitchen for as long as anyone could remember.
The fantastical landscape was the kind anyone might have readily believed to be part of an alien world if they hadn’t seen it before, and Dan had taken delight in imagining just that when he had visited as a child and gazed at the majestic sandstone pillars and logic-defying rock formations.
As birds chattered in the distance and the most eager of the day’s many human visitors arrived, the reporter continued in a serious tone as she cited unconfirmed reports that all GSC command centres were operating at the highest alert level.
For viewers at home, her report cut to a snippet from a brief radio interview GSC Chairman William Godfrey had conducted overnight. His face filled one side of the screen with his words transcribed on the other as he spoke.
Godfrey refused to be drawn on claims that Billy Kendrick, now safely aboard his tour ship and heading towards New Swabia, had been detained without justification by GSC staff for several hours.
