Alien Hunter: Underworld (7 page)

They had thrown away two of their lives and sent this third being on a suicide mission, because the real ambush was not intended to happen at the Miller house at all, but here, in this room, where Flynn would least expect it.

The place suddenly felt cold, freezing. The stink of the room, blood and cordite, was sickening. Moving fast, he snatched his duffel out of the car and dug out his cell phone.

He punched in the numbers that would take him to a scrambled signal, then called Diana.

“Jesus God, what have you been doing for seven hours?”

“I pulled the battery on my phone.”

“I thought you were a goner. Give me a heads-up next time.”

“I'm at Wright-Pat. There's been an incident. I've ordered our facility here sealed.”

“An incident? What kind of an incident?”

“You need a team out here to clean up some atypical remains. Plus there's a casualty. An airman.”

“Shit!”

“The body's been mutilated. You'll need to commandeer it. Our eyes only.”

“What are you telling me?”

“What you need to do! And I need a plane.” He would have preferred to drive to Washington, but there was no time for that now.

He left the facility, closed the access door, and listened as the locks clicked into place on the other side. The cleanup team from their unit were now the only people on the planet with the code needed to open this door.

He wondered whom she would choose. Things had gone wrong before, but this was the only time anything remotely this messy had happened.

An airman pulled up in a big SUV. He got out to open the door, but Flynn let himself in. He sat in silence as he was driven to the flight line. When they arrived, a jet was just being positioned on the apron. It was the full dinner: a general officer's plane complete with a cabin crew of two.

“You don't need to stay on board,” he said as he stooped to enter the plane.

“Sir?”

“Leave the aircraft, please. You're not needed today.” There was no reason to put anybody in harm's way who didn't absolutely need to be there.

The two stewards looked at each other.

“Do it!”

Slowly, they went to the rear of the cabin. When the crew were down on the apron, he activated the steps. The steps came up, the door closed, and he locked it down. He signaled the pilots. “Get this thing cleared and get it moving.”

There was some sort of a reply, but he didn't listen. As always, he had work to do. He'd been away from his unending records search for over thirty hours, and he didn't like that. He pulled out his iPad and hooked into the secure network, then began once again searching police reports—town by town, and city by city.

He looked at murders, disappearances, accidents, anything that might lead to the dark place that was his beat. He worked for an hour. For two. He stopped only when he had assured himself that his beat was for the moment quiet.

He wouldn't allow himself to hope, but maybe—just maybe—he had indeed gotten the last of them. Maybe it was just him and Morris now.

He listened to the roar of the wind speeding past the airframe and to the noise of the engines. He let his eyes close and was immediately asleep, or as asleep as he ever got. The doctors called it “guarded sleep,” the sleep of men in combat. He dreamed of Abby on a blue day on the beach, watching the gulls wheel. The sweet smell of her cornsilk hair filled his memory, and he sighed and turned as if toward somebody in the seat beside him.

His eyes opened. He had become aware of a change in the pitch of the engines. He evaluated it. Normal. They were landing.

New rules: Be faster on the scene than ever before. When the aliens are apparently dead, cut the remains to pieces.

It was an air force plane, but it landed him in the general aviation section at Dulles.

He left without a word, not looking back. The mystified pilots watched him cross the tarmac and disappear into the terminal. They had never even seen his face.

 

CHAPTER SIX

WHILE HE
was away, Flynn's personal car had been moved into the general aviation parking lot. He walked over to it, a black Audi R8 GT. To a man with his reflexes, most cars drove like buses. The R8 did not.

There was a bag from Wagshal's on the passenger seat, which, as his standing order with Transportation instructed, contained a pastrami on rye and a Brooklyn Lager. As a Southwest 737 screamed past not a hundred feet overhead, he opened the bag, cracked the can of beer, started the car, and headed out.

He had no idea how long it had been since he ate, but the sandwich did not last until the Beltway. He got an hour of sleep on the flight, so he felt fairly rested. It had been uneasy sleep, though. Things were spinning out of control, and he knew it.

He took the exit off the GW Parkway and stopped in the guard station at CIA headquarters. He drove around the back of the main building and then into the underground facility, over to where cars that couldn't be exposed to passing satellites were parked. He sat in his car with the windows down, just listening to the space. He got out. Nobody else here, the parking spots mostly empty. Even as he was walking through the facility's relative safety, his extreme sense of caution did not change. They might have failed on this day, and they might all be dead, but he still worried about ambush anywhere, anytime.

In the long, clean corridors of the CIA, people gave him the usual glances. In his patrolman days, his uniforms had always been sharp. As a detective, he'd worn a suit with a string tie and a Stetson, an outfit intended to make him disappear into the north Texas woodwork. No more. Now he was too fixated on his job to worry about appearances. As long as his clothes were street legal, that was all that mattered to him.

As he was approaching their section, another text came in. This time, it was the number 676, once again from a blocked line.

He stopped in his tracks, staring down at the screen.

He was looking at what had been Dan Miller's full employee number at Deer Island.

No way this could be a coincidence, and somebody certainly wanted him to know that.

He got to the numbered door that concealed headquarters. He paused. This time, it could be seriously argued that he'd screwed up on every possible level. He set his jaw, paused for a moment, then went in.

The same kids were at the same consoles, working at the same intractable problems of translation and communication. As he passed silently among them, he could feel their uneasy disapproval like a sour smoke.

“Anybody wants a head for their den, let me know.”

It was his standard joke, but this time there was no ripple of laughter.

He pushed through into Diana's sleek lair. She was not sitting at her desk, not exactly. She was poised there.

“Don't hit me,” he said, cringing back and raising his hands.

“Flynn,
why
?”

“He got in the line of fire.”

“You killed four people!”

Had there been anybody else in there? No. “Wrong body count, and I didn't kill anybody. A kid got killed. Big difference, Diana.”

“If you'd done your job right, nobody would be dead.”

“I ordered the facility evacuated. Maybe he was deaf, I don't know. An airman died, and I'm sad about it. But it was one. Not four.”

“We consider the aliens you killed people.”

“Not legally, they aren't.”

“Flynn, that's the last time you throw that in my face, okay? You've gotten yourself into huge trouble, and us along with you. Hell, the whole planet, Flynn! What if they could just push a button and we're history?”

“I've gained a lot of intelligence on this mission.”

She raised her eyebrows.

“The exsanguinations are explained. What I saw was one of those monsters—”

“Please.”

“What am I supposed to call them? What's the politically correct term? Tell me, because I want to know.”

“Try calling them people.”

He let it lie. “It used the airman's blood to coat itself in a human form.”

She gave him a long, searching look.

“Do you understand what I'm saying? Because it's kind of important.”

“We're going out to Area Fifty-One, you and I.” The exobiology group was located there, scientists who sat in the desert thinking up reasons that contact with Aeon could be made to work.

“I don't have time.”

“You have time.”

“I have time to keep searching for cases, and that's all the time I have.”

“Let me tell you what those kids out on the floor have been doing ever since you went on your murder mission.”

“Excuse me, policing mission.”

“They've been communicating with Aeon, trying to save your life.”

“Well, thank them for me. Unless I'm headed for a meeting with the needle. Then don't thank them.”

“A deal has been struck, Flynn.”

“Which involves the scientists at Area Fifty-One how?”

“You will accompany me to Area Fifty-One. Consider that an order.”

He thought about that. Normally, she did everything she could to satisfy her brief from the scientists—short of giving him direct orders like this. That way, he could go on doing his job and she could go on being quietly relieved he was getting kills.

“Diana, we both know that everything coming out of Area Fifty-One is bullshit. In any case, I want to go to Deer Island.”

“Why?”

“I got another one of those calls: 333676. Ring a bell?”

“No.”

“It's Dan Miller's employee number.”

She got up and went to her “window.” They were in a basement, so it was actually just a poster of the Grand Tetons she'd bought at Target and tacked to her wall.

“I love it when you stare out at the view. It always means you know I'm right.”

She turned. “We're on a strict schedule. And frankly, if you want to stay in one piece, you'd better cooperate.”

For a moment, he thought about it, then spread his hands, gesturing surrender. “You can count on me, boss. Down the line.”

“We leave at six. You might think about taking a shower.”

He glanced at his watch. Half an hour wouldn't give him time to go home. “Can I use your lair?” Her suite had a private sitting room and a full bath, which he often used between cases.

“I'm gonna try to have a meeting in here. We're cataloging new transmissions. So don't disturb us, if you can manage that.”

“Yes, ma'am.” He went through into the luxuriously furnished private suite that was a perk of her Senior Executive Service pay grade. The luxuries that interested him weren't things like her Persian carpets, gleaming antiques, and 3-D TV. His cars were a luxury—the Audi and the Ferrari California that waited for him in Texas. Most of his guns were there as well—his pistols, his sniper rifles, his matched pair of Purdey shotguns handed down in the family for three generations. These were his luxuries, and the wine cellar his family started in the 1920s, when their land in the Permian Basin south of Menard had turned out to be a raft floating on a lake of oil.

For most of his life, he had preferred to live only on what he made, but after Abby's disappearance, he found himself wanting to embrace his own heritage. A couple of years back, he had started drawing on the family trust. In a strange way, it made him feel less alone.

In keeping with family tradition, he lived modestly. Until he started buying extreme cars a couple of years ago, few people outside his small circle of close friends had any idea that he had money. The way he figured it, though, the work he did now was shortening his life, probably by a lot of years, so whatever he was going to enjoy, he needed to do that right now.

He threw off his clothes, realizing as he dropped them onto her antique Sultanabad carpet, that they were really pretty damn dirty. Stained, too, with greenish purple blood.

Showers bothered him. He didn't like being in places with only one exit. He wanted two ways out, always. He turned the gold handles in her marble shower stall and let the water flow until it was steaming. Then he stepped in. He left the door open and faced outward into the bathroom as he methodically washed himself.

The hot water felt good on his skin, except where it burned in his latest wounds. He stepped out of the stall, opened the medicine cabinet, and rummaged until he found some disinfectant. Then he pulled the ugliest cut apart by drawing his shoulder forward, and poured the disinfectant in. There was pain. A lot, in fact.

As he dried himself, he realized that his clothes were too gross to wear. The room stank like some kind of bovine had rolled in it. Wrapping the towel around his waist, he went to the exquisitely carved dresser. He opened the bottom drawer, which was where his things were kept. He often showered and changed here—slept here, too. From here, he could move on cases a lot faster than he could from home.

But what the hell was this shirt? It wasn't one of his.

“Hey,” he called, “what is this thing, a bolero shirt?”

No answer from the office. That's right, her meeting was out there. And, as a matter of fact, he was hearing his name mentioned, was he not? He strolled over to the door. Yep, they were talking about him.

He went out waving the shirt. “I can't wear this.”

“Put some clothes on.”

“I can't wear a blouse.”

“That's an ordinary man's shirt. Unlike your tees, it happens to have a collar. Something you apparently haven't worn in some time. Now, get dressed.”

“Sorry, kids,” he said to the staring young faces, “I didn't mean to frighten you.” He started to put on the shirt.

“Flynn, get out!”

“You said get dressed, boss.” He sat on the edge of her desk. “So, what's the latest findings? Aeon turn out to be big on comedy clubs? Marijuana dispensaries? Too bad they don't have decent cops.”