The Trojan Horse

Chapter Eleven

Washington DC

USA, Day 20

“I’m afraid I can’t let you go any further.”

Jayne nodded at the policeman as she halted in front of the tape someone had thoughtfully stretched across the doorway. POLICE LINE — KEEP OUT it read, as if anyone would just run past the burly policeman and into the cramped apartment. From her vantage point, she could see a handful of stuffed bookcases, a sofa that had clearly been dragged halfway across the room — and a chalk outline on the ground where the dead body had fallen. A handful of police photographers were wandering around, taking photos with monotonous regularity, but little else seemed to be going on. Washington had too many murders per month and not all of them, whatever the Washington PD claimed, were solved.

There was little spectacular about the death of Albert Grossman, honours student at Caltech and current wage slave in a company that cared more for brute labour than it did for the hopes and aspirations of the young men and women who were entering the job market. Jayne was honest enough to admit that under ordinary circumstances, she would never have given the murder a second thought — but Albert Grossman was also Arnie Pie of the Blogger Association Network. His murder was odd enough, but a handful of bloggers had checked the details and raised a disturbing question. What were the odds of at least eight anti-alien personages being killed within the same few days? Six bloggers, a newspaper reporter and a fact-finder for CNN’s website had all died within days of one another — and the only thing they had in common was that they had all raised concerns about the Snakes.

She looked up at the policeman. He wasn’t someone used to the streets, really; he’d admitted that he was more of a glorified dispatcher. Someone who owed the BAN a favour had arranged for him to escort Jayne to the murder scene; Jayne had been privately amused to watch his eyes straying from her breasts to her rear end, as if he’d never been given any training in how to interact with the media. Not that she cared, really; if he was attracted to her, he might be more willing to answer her questions.

“He didn’t deserve to die,” she said, bluntly. It was easy to inject a note of sorrow into her voice. Death was never amusing, even when the person in question deserved to die. And who was she to make such a judgement anyway? “Do you know who did it?”

She hoped that it would be taken for a naïve question. “I’m afraid we have little to go on,” the policeman admitted, finally. “No one saw anything; no one knows anything; no one is prepared to admit to anything without a lawyer. This is one of the places where everyone minds their own business and doesn’t speak to the police, which turns it into a very satisfactory place for anyone engaged in criminal activity. There are at least ten druggies in this area, along with five prostitutes and at least one suspected robber. But we can’t pin anything on him and if we rounded up the prostitutes, they would be replaced within the day.”

Jayne nodded. She’d covered human interest stories back in the days when she’d been a cub reporter. Even the honest and decent folks living in poor areas tended to view the police as their natural enemy, tools of a shadowy government that was prepared to interfere in their lives, but not to do anything to actually help them. There were a dozen theories as to why that was the case — Jayne believed that it had something to do with low sentences and lack of discipline — yet it hardly mattered. The bottom line was that the murderer would probably go unnoticed.

“He worked for the BAN,” she said, changing the subject slightly. Most policemen loved the BAN; hell, a number of bloggers were policemen. That was technically a violation of their service agreements, but they’re done excellent work exposing the stupidities of rules and regulations imposed by men who never walked the streets while wearing their uniforms. “Would we be able to get access to his computer files?”

“I’d have to check,” the policeman said. Jayne moved, just slightly, to show him another centimetre of cleavage, but it didn’t change his mind. “The stiff left behind no will; we wouldn’t even have known about his death if he hadn’t left a key with his former girlfriend. She came to pick up some of her stuff from his flat and found his dead body. I’m afraid that she had hysterics and we had to remove her to a hospital. I think his parents will wind up with his gear; perhaps they could let you have access…”

Jayne thanked him and walked away, heading down the stairs to the streets below. It was a blustery cold day in Washington, with hints of rain falling from the sky to the ground. She shivered and pulled her coat around her as the wind blew stronger, pushing against her. As a child, she’d feared the wind; now, she looked up into the gloomy sky and wondered what was lurking high overhead. The observatories said that the alien starships could be seen with the naked eye, but Washington was too bright a city for anyone to have any hope of picking out a single light high overhead.

Every reporter dreamed of stumbling onto a story that would make their names famous over the entire world. Journalists still studied the Watergate story, where a team of journalists had discovered a trail that led all the way back to President Nixon himself. America had lost her innocence that day, Jayne considered; the day when they’d discovered that even the highest in the land could be brought low by the media. It had been the day when the media had started to shift from reporting the truth to scrutinising everything the government said, convinced that the government had to be lying to cover up dark intentions…

There was no conspiracy, she knew. Nine times out of ten, there was no conspiracy; the government truly was as incompetent as it had seemed. And yet people still believed in the most insane conspiracy theories, from the American government having known about the 9/11 plot and doing nothing to the American government actually carrying out the bombing itself. It seemed to her that the people who chose to believe such insane theories were actually looking for a kind of reassurance, a sense that even if something had gone wrong, someone was still in control. The idea that screw-ups happened anyway terrified them.

But maybe there was a conspiracy after all. A number of people who happened to hold anti-alien views were dead — and no one had been arrested or seemed likely to be arrested for the crime. And that suggested that the killers were professional assassins, trying to disguise the murders behind simple ‘robberies gone wrong.’ And who benefited from that? Only one answer came to mind.

Stepping into a shop entrance to escape the wind, she pulled her cell phone out of her pocket and called an old friend. He was curious, but agreed to meet her without asking any more questions. If she was right — and if cell phone networks were being monitored — saying the words out loud might just make her the next statistic in a murder investigation.

They met at Kent’s Bar and Grill, a deafeningly loud eatery that catered to Washington’s students and junior workers. It was difficult to hold any kind of civil conversation over the music, but it should have the effect of making it very difficult for anyone to overhear their words. Besides, there were enough distractions in the crowded bar to make it very difficult for someone to peer into their corner without being blindingly obvious.

Vincent Felt had shared a journalism class with her, back before they’d both graduated and he’d gone to work for the New York Times. He’d always had a little crush on her, which Jayne had exploited ruthlessly from time to time. The BAN might be growing, but it didn’t have the same level of access possessed by the Grey Lady — and besides, many people thought that the internet wasn’t quite real. He was a tall man tending towards obesity, a trend encouraged by the large plate of nachos and salsa he was devouring while talking to her.

“The word’s come down from on high,” he said, as he held out a dripping nacho for her. Jayne took one look at the cheese oozing off it and shook her head. She’d contented herself with fries and a coke. “The aliens are friendly and the human race should commit themselves to the Galactic Federation.”

Jayne scowled as she took a sip of coke. Most of the deaths also had one other thing in common; almost all of the victims used modern media like the internet, rather than old-fashioned print media or even television. She’d expected more interest from the newspapers, but it seemed as if the fix was in already. Reporters didn’t get anything like as much freedom of action as the public generally assumed. Only a complete fool of a reporter would push a story forward knowing that his editor — or senior management — would disapprove. The stories the public were told might bear only a slight resemblance to the truth, or might ignore the truth altogether. It was very rare for a story to be reported with the emotional detachment that was the key to true reporting.

“I see,” she said. “And who issued the order?”

“It came down from senior management,” Felt explained. He swallowed another nacho and burped contently. “The editing staff weren’t too chuffed about it, I can tell you. They normally get to decide how to slant the story themselves.”

Jayne nodded. “Is there anyone in the political field being pushed forward?”

“Not as far as we can tell,” Felt admitted. “We have orders to promote the causes of politicians who have verbally committed themselves to supporting the Galactics — and mankind’s efforts to get into their Federation. Those who refuse to support the Galactics…”

He didn’t need to finish the sentence. They both knew that a carefully-placed story, just one hair short of libel, could destroy a political career. There were plenty of politicians whose only fault had been irritating the media — and discovered that their side of the story was being presented with a magnifying glass held over his flaws. A written story always had more influence than the internet, although that might be changing. The newer generations were far more comfortable with the internet than their parents — and why should they allow editing staff to decide what they wanted to watch?

“Clever,” Jayne said. She was starting to have a very bad feeling about the whole thing. Part of her was tempted to bring Felt into her confidence, but one of the reasons he would never make it into the BAN was because he hated to question authority. Anything she gave him would end up in front of his superiors — where, if she were lucky, it would merely be dumped in the waste paper bin. “Thank you for your help.”

She spent just long enough with him to allay any suspicions that all she’d been interested in was knowing who might be trying to shape public opinion, and then escaped the racket. Walking down the streets towards her apartment, she made a handful of phone calls to a number of trustworthy bloggers. Two of them were her mortal enemies online, but she knew that they could be trusted to stand up for themselves. The truth was out there and — these days — bloggers did more for exposing it than any other part of the media. She was still smiling at the thought when she froze. An alien was standing at the bottom of the street.

They did look like humanoid snakes, she realised, as she found her legs shaking with tension. The alien moved on as if he hadn’t seen her, accompanied by a pair of uniformed soldiers and someone wearing a nondescript suit. He was smoking like a chimney, despite the health risks — or had the aliens promised a cure for cancer among their other miracles? And what were they doing near her apartment? Terrified, she spent nearly twenty minutes — after the alien had gone — telling herself that it would be safe to return home, before she headed to a nearby guesthouse and paid cash for a single night’s stay. Cold logic told her that the aliens wouldn’t have shown their hand so blatantly if they wanted to assassinate her — and they might not even have realised that she was on to them — but cold logic provided very little reassurance. As soon as she was in the rented room, she lay down on the bed and found herself shaking helplessly. She had never felt so threatened in her entire life.

It almost made her want to give up and vanish into the country, but the thought of the great reporters like Woodward and Bernstein forced her to carry on. Somehow, she managed to take a shower and head back outside towards her destination, the Spandrel Caravan. It had been founded as a place for bloggers to meet in person — an experience that was often disappointing — and served as neutral ground for the BAN. Jayne admired the idea behind the eatery, not least the meeting rooms, which had been secured with the most advanced technology in the public domain. Rumour had it that the CIA had sealed a lock on a story by outfitting the meeting rooms themselves and ensuring that no one could spy on the bloggers. She’d asked twelve of her comrades to meet with her; not entirely to her surprise, only eight turned up.

“Thank you all for coming,” she said. They were all reporting bloggers, rather than political analysts and commenters. Most of them had real journalist experience that they used to ensure that their reports were as clear and factual as possible. “I won’t mince words. I’m onto something that could be the biggest story in the entire history of journalism, but it could also get us all killed. Those of you who agree to work with me won’t just have non-disclosure agreements to worry about — this could be more dangerous than Jonny Russell’s scoop four years ago.”

She watched as it sank in, slowly. Jonny Russell had been an investigative reporter in California who’d discovered that the Governor of the state had close links with a Mexican criminal organisation that had been terrorising Northern Mexico and Hispanic regions in America. He’d nearly been killed four times before the FBI put him in a secure witness protection program; the story had ended the Governor’s career and gone a long way towards cleaning up California. And if he had been just an inch less lucky, he would have died and no one would have known the truth.

“We will have to assume the absolute worst,” she added. “There will be very powerful vested interests out to stop us. We may well end up dead — or worse. Do you have any objections to this level of danger? If so, you may as well walk out now. Nothing will be disclosed without your agreement.”

She’d carefully picked friends without families, without anyone dependent upon them. One left, a man she knew to be courting a girl at the office; the others remained where they were. It was the closest she’d get to agreement, she knew. Bloggers rarely trusted one another too closely. Besides, any official agreement might be detected by the aliens. The dead blogger’s name and address had been stored under tight encryption at a data haven in England and the aliens had still tracked him down. They had to assume the worst — and that meant that anything placed in a computer might be read by unfriendly eyes.

“I believe that someone is manipulating the world,” she said, and outlined everything she’d dug up over the past hour. The suspicious deaths, the media slant, odd trading on the stock market… and alien technology being hyped as the cure for all mankind’s ills. “And that someone may not be from this world.”

There was a long aghast pause. “My god, Jayne,” one of her friends said, finally. “Are you sure about this?”

“As sure as I can be,” Jayne admitted. “We need to do a hell of a lot more grunt work before we have anything more than suspicions — and then we need to decide what to do about it. Until then, no one is to put anything on computers; we’ll go back to the days when we used real notebooks and pencils. I want you to remember how the NSA hacked our computers last year; the aliens could be a great deal worse.”

“My sister’s kid loves the aliens,” one of her older friends said. She sounded stunned, as stunned as the rest of them. They had all read the posted blogs, they all knew about the discrepancies in the alien statements, and yet… learning that they might all be lies was shattering. “He was talking about joining the Witnesses after they set up a recruitment booth on campus.”

“I suggest you don’t say anything to your sister,” Jayne said, firmly. “This is what we’re going to do. We’re going to follow the money; we’re going to find out who is benefiting from the alien presence and why. And then we’re going to try and figure out what they actually want on Earth.”

It had only been a few decades since the Soviet Union had tried to manipulate the Western media into convincing the West to let down its guard. Jayne had been a child when the Berlin Wall fell, but she’d heard about it in the years she’d studied journalism. So many had been profoundly shocked when Communism had fallen apart and its moral bankruptcy had been exposed for all to see. And so many had refused to believe the truth.

“And then…”

She shook her head. “God knows what we will do.”