Christopher Nuttall - The Trojan Horse

He would have liked to believe the silken promises offered by the Galactics and their supporters, but he didn’t dare. In the real world, no one did anything for nothing — and some took their payment in feel-good feelings. The thought that they had done something to help pleased people; the fact that giving money to a homeless druggie only helped the druggie to keep doping himself seemed to have escaped their notice. Even if the Galactics meant well, that didn’t mean that they would actually do good.

The knock on the door was loud and firm. He scowled as he changed course and marched towards the door, mentally cataloguing anything incriminating that might be in sight. His apartment had been raided once before when the Washington PD had got the wrong address; they’d damaged his computers, confiscated anything that even looked significant… and refused to pay any compensation. They hadn’t even admitted that they’d screwed up and raided the wrong apartment. And the mainstream media hadn’t cared enough to send a reporter to make the whole thing public.

He peeked through the peephole and blinked in surprise. Instead of a pair of uniformed policemen, there was a single man standing outside the door. He was black, with dark stubble on his cheeks and a short, almost military haircut. The dark coat he wore concealed almost everything else. He looked official, maybe a Fed; Arnie wondered, grimly, what he might have done this time. It was well known that the Feds kept an eye on the BAN after the network had been used to distribute official papers proving that the government had been economical with the truth.

The door clicked as it opened. “Yes?”

“I’m Federal Agent Davenant,” the black man said, holding up a card. Arnie made a show of studying it, but in truth he wasn’t sure precisely what a FBI card looked like. “I’m investigating a case at the moment; are you alone in the apartment?”

Somehow, he’d moved forward enough to block the door. “Yes,” Arnie said. “Do you have a warrant…”

He never completed the sentence. The man lunged forward and slammed the palm of his hand into Arnie’s neck. Arnie was barely aware of a crack before darkness loomed up and swallowed him whole. He was dead before his body hit the ground.

Moving with a speed that belied his bulk, Davenant swooped down on the body and dragged it into the apartment. Closing the door behind him, he carted the body over to the sofa and dumped it out of sight. The research had said that the blogger lived alone — there was no girlfriend at present — but there was no way to be entirely certain. Once the body was hidden from casual view, he went into the next room and looted a drawer of cash and a handful of small items that could be fenced easily. By the time the police found the body — it would start to smell soon enough — it would look like a robbery that had turned into a murder.

Smiling to himself, he looked around the apartment one final time and then left, closing the door behind him. No one saw him leave.

Near Mannington, Virginia

USA, Day 20

“I wonder,” Toby asked himself silently, “if I’m doing the right thing.”

It had taken several days to set up the meeting. He could have just picked up a phone or emailed, but he had to assume that the aliens were monitoring cell phone conversations — and he was already a target for their attentions. In the end, he’d had to send a friend to speak to his father and trust his father not to ask too many questions over an open line. Luckily, Colonel Sanderson was just as paranoid as his son, although for different reasons. He had arranged the meeting without comment.

He followed his father into his study, feeling old memories crawling up into his mind. The bookcase, containing his father’s collection of manuals from his military service, books he’d studied as a child. The desk, a heavy wooden object that had been passed down from the first Sanderson to buy the farm and raise a family in America; his father was the only one allowed to use it, at least until he passed the farm on to his children. The leather chair, the one he’d bent over for a thrashing after a schoolboy prank had gone horrifyingly wrong… the room’s smells assailed his nostrils, bringing back memories from the past. And the two pictures hanging on an otherwise plain wooden wall; Mary Sanderson, Toby’s mother, and Robert Sanderson, his elder brother, the one he’d looked up to as a child. They were both long dead.

There were nine people seated in the room, waiting for him. They were all ex-military, mainly from the infantry, although one of them was a Marine. The Colonel had no truck with those who argued that the Marines weren’t real soldiers, not after he’d fought alongside the Marines in the Gulf. He did have a prejudice against the politicians in uniforms who fought wars to please the media rather than concentrating on actually winning, but Toby wouldn’t have disagreed with that sentiment. Ten years in Washington had left him with few illusions about the true nature of politics. For every Senator and Congressmen genuinely devoted to the country — or even to their state — there was a dozen devoted to nothing more than their own power.

His father opened the meeting with the Pledge of Allegiance, a reminder that they all served — or had served — the United States of America. Toby, who had heard his father’s rants about businessmen who refused to feature the pledge at their annual meetings, echoed their words, even though he wasn’t sure how much it meant. Doing the right thing for the country required careful consideration of what the country actually needed, rather than knee-jerk reflexes from both sides of the political divide. There were men in his father’s clannish network that would happily ban abortion and yet refuse to teach children about sex, ensuring that the number of teenage pregnancies continued to rise. Toby had never been impressed with either side of the argument.

“Very well, Toby,” his father said, finally. Toby thought that the old man had been pleased to see him, but it wasn’t in his nature to slaughter the fatted calf and welcome his lost son home — at least not at once. “You wanted this meeting. Here we are, waiting on you.”

Toby nodded, slowly. He knew five of the men; old friends of his father, dangerous men with a sense of honour, the sense that separated warriors from the barbarians warriors fought to keep away from the civilians. The other four were strangers. It was a good thing, in a way; if he was taken and interrogated, he wouldn’t be able to betray all of them to the aliens — or to the FBI. The Federal Government disliked what it chose to call right-wing militias and devoted a vast amount of effort to tracking them down and maintaining surveillance over potential targets. And the aliens would presumably have access to all of their files…

“Before we begin, there is something I need to make clear,” he said. He was nervous, but his voice sounded steady. It helped that he had known most of them since childhood; Blake Coleman, a massive black man, wasn’t too intimidating to the kid he’d bounced on his knee or carried on his shoulders across a river. The sudden childhood memory almost made his voice catch. “The information I will impart to you is — at least partly — covered by any number of regulations governing national security. The Federal Government has chosen to assert that civilian possession of this information will threaten national security. If you listen to me, you may face legal action; if anyone wants to leave now, please do so.”

“Respectfully suggest,” one of the strangers grunted, “that you quit insulting us and get to the point.”