Alien Hunter (Flynn Carroll) (13 page)

“Whose house is this, anyway?”

“A sublet,” Diana said. “We found it on Craigslist.”

“
Craigslist?
”

“We move a lot.”

The woman opened a big oak door at the end of the hall. He followed her into a large room that Flynn guessed must have once been a solarium. It was on the back of the house and full of tall windows, but as dark as a cave. The expansive windows were covered by curtains.

In the middle of the room there stood a man of significant height, six three at least. As they came in, he glared down at them out of eyes sunken so deep in his head that they were like craters. His hair was completely white.

“Sorry to be meeting under these tragic circumstances,” he said. “And I apologize for the—” He gestured, indicating the costumes. “I’m allergic to everything.” He sighed. “I can’t even leave the house.”

Slowly, then, he turned to Diana. Some kind of electricity passed between them, and Flynn thought that this was the person she had reported to from Montana. He also thought that they were more than coworkers.

“My name is Oltisis,” he said, and at that moment he walked into a shaft of light, and Flynn saw that he had compound eyes, many-lensed like the eyes of a fly.

He sucked breath, but instantly controlled it. Let it out slow. As he did, the face turned toward him. Unhurried. The eyes seemed blank. But they also told Flynn that this was an alien. Okay, that explained all the secrecy.

“I don’t surprise you?”

“You do.”

“You’re very contained, then.”

“As are you.”

“I’m a cop, Lieutenant Flynn.” Oltisis crossed the room in two sleek strides. Flynn saw more than cop in the way he moved, he saw military. Lethal military. This alien might or might not be a cop, but he was certainly a professional killer.

As he sat on a broad leather couch that almost fit him, he gestured toward two wing chairs.

Flynn could hardly tear his own eyes away from that face. The lips were narrow and precise, the skin was as slick and featureless as plastic, and the deep-set eyes gleamed in the thin yellow light that filled the room.

No question, this was not a disguise. He was face to face with a real alien. But he also had a case to deal with. Men were dead. He said, “We need more people, and we need them now. We need help.”

Oltisis looked toward Diana. “I put together a cleanup crew to go back to the Hoffman place. Air Police. They’re totally out of the loop.” His English was perfect. Not the slightest accent.

“Did they find any trace of Hoffman and the daughter?” Flynn asked.

“Doctor Hoffman was in a snowdrift two hundred yards from the house. Frozen to death. Looked exactly like he’d wandered away and gotten lost. Nice touch, he had a bag of garbage with him.” He made a gravelly sound that Flynn realized was laughter, but it was bitter, that was very clear. In fact, it sounded like defeat.

“We need to break this case,” Flynn said.

“Ah?”

“You look beaten. Sorry.”

“And you don’t, Flynn.”

“Am I a fool, then?”

Oltisis met his eyes with his own glittering jewels. “No,” he said carefully, “you are not. Flynn—may I call you Flynn—this is a new kind of police operation. We’ve got a criminal element operating here and we can’t move freely among you. Thus the liaison effort.”

“You could surely devise some sort of disguse.”

“The allergic response is too deep. We’d need to create human bodies for ourselves.”

“So do it. You must be loaded with high tech.”

“If one of us is to acquire a human body, one of you has to die.”

“I see.”

“Criminals steal bodies.” He lowered his head. “That’s what happened to your wife.”

Flynn went silent inside. For the first time, he knew that she was dead. Believed it. Images of her raced through his mind, too fast to track, but of her in her happiness. He swallowed his thrashing sorrow. “Did she suffer?”

Oltisis stared into Flynn’s pain, his eyes as blank as a shark’s. Flynn thought, “This alien has seen a lot of violence, a lot of death.” He continued to question him. “How many other field units do you have? How many officers on your side of the fence?”

“We need more, I agree.”

What the hell? Could this be true? “Don’t tell me it’s just the three of us.”

Diana said, “If it gets out that this is happening and not even the aliens can put a stop to it—”

“Jesus Christ, you need a whole damn division on this! The FBI and Interpol, at the least!”

“This gets out, mankind panics and contact gets set back fifty years. No, Flynn, secrecy is essential.”

Cops sure as hell couldn’t keep secrets, that was true enough, and the public would sure as hell panic, no question there, either. “People need to be warned. Otherwise they have no chance.”

“Help us get this cleaned up.”

“My wife was kidnapped eight years ago! So how long is it going to take? There are hundreds of people dead. You’re wired into the government, you just moved around a unit of Air Police, so put some resources on this or I’m going public.” But even as he said it, he knew that it was hopeless. Nobody would believe him, not without this creature in tow, and that was obviously not going to happen.

“You signed a secrecy agreement, Flynn. Don’t forget that.”

“He’s fine,” Oltisis said. “He just figured it out.”

“But he said—”

“You’re on board, aren’t you, Flynn? You’ve seen the problem.”

Flynn nodded. Oltisis was so sharp, it was almost like having your mind read. “I understand the need for secrecy. But there have to be more resources.”

“Rebuild your team. I can do that.”

“Bigger. And top people. Delta Force operators. CIA field officers. The best of the best. And better equipment. Jesus, you people must have some incredible equipment, not crap like that MindRay.”

“That’s one of ours.”

“Is it a toy, because if that’s the best you can do, I have a real problem with your technology.”

Again, Oltisis laughed, and this time Flynn got it loud and clear, the cynical laughter of the cop who knows only one truth: every single piece of equipment he possesses is inferior to what the crooks have.

“What’re you, fifty years ahead of us? I expected aliens to be, like, a million years ahead of us. But you’ve got powerful crooks and shitty equipment just like we do.”

“Budgets are budgets, Flynn. And we’re about a thousand years ahead of you, if you want to know. Among other things, we can manipulate gravity and you can’t. But you will. We’re helping you speed up your development, because there needs to be an alliance between our species. We’re similar and that’s rare and valuable. It strange out there and it’s dangerous. We need a friend, and so do you.”

Flynn said, “You use your connections to get us the best cops and the best operatives you can find, and I am with you.”

Oltisis said, “We’ve been doing that.”

“So you came up with a small-town police officer like me. I think I’m a good cop, but let’s face it, my skill set is limited because my department’s needs are limited. We don’t train up supercops in Menard, Texas.”

“You have an IQ of two twenty. Did you know that?”

“I did not.”

“And you’re also highly motivated. We are doing our job, Lieutenant.”

“So let’s get on with it.”

“We have someone in custody.”

He was stunned. Then he wasn’t. “But he’s not the perp we’re looking for?”

“No,” Diana interjected. “This is one of his customers. My unit got him.” She paused for a long moment. “My old unit.”

Oltisis said, “He was a thrill seeker. Among us, life is all too predictable. It’s one of the major reasons we explore as we do. In any case, he came here, bought a human body and just basically went wild, indulging his every fantasy, and he doesn’t have pretty fantasies.”

“I thought aliens would be—well, different.”

“There’s greed and self-indulgence everywhere.”

“And the crime committed?”

Oltisis looked steadily at Flynn. “He raped fifty-six of your women, killing forty of them in the process.”

“Jesus.”

“If he’s sent home with the evidence we have, he’s going to walk. We have a real problem on Earth gathering forensics to a level our courts accept. In our system, a case cannot be presented until guilt is certain. The only judicial issue is the sentence. We need a confession out of him, Flynn.”

“Now, are you saying that this thing—being, excuse me—has
two
bodies, one human and one like you?”

“Let me explain a little further.”

“That would help.”

“Every living body contains an incredibly dense plasma that bears all its memories, even every detail of its physical form. It’s the template, and it’s effectively eternal. In our world, doctors can move this plasma from an aged body to a young one. It’s also possible to cross species, but it’s highly illegal. I could enter a human body. I could live among you. At home, I’m just another person. But here, with my knowledge and my power, I’d be a god.”

“So what about death? Do you die?”

“If you wish.”

“If you
wish
?”

“When a human dies, your soul will linger on Earth if you have unfinished business here. Eventually, a new body will come along—an infant—that fits it, and you’ll enter the new body and return to life. With us, the process is no longer natural. I have a stem cell packet that can be grown into a new body.” He gestured toward himself. “If this dies, I can simply move to a new version of myself.”

“Will you?”

The face—horrible and strange and yet somehow deeply human—took on an eerie, concealing expression. “You can’t have known this, but that’s as rude a question as one of us can be asked.”

“Rude? I don’t get it. Why rude?”

“Let’s move on, shall we? Body theft is a major crime, as you may imagine. And when it involves interfering with an alien species, especially a less advanced one like yours, it’s actually our most serious crime.”

“But the exterior identity—what we can track—that remains the same, am I right? So this guy has a human ID. A human past.”

“The process works like this. A person is kidnapped. Then the heart is stopped and the whole body transformed into stem cells, which are grown on a new template. The new body fits the purchaser’s soul, and he enters it. The new ‘person’ won’t look the same as the one who was used to construct him. He won’t have the same DNA signature, either.”

“You can do all that?”

“At home, by law your new body would need to be an exact replica of your old one. But here, well, you don’t have body switching yet. So no law and no local enforcement infrastructure. Which is why there’s a ring operating, selling my species human bodies so they can live on Earth.”

“That’s a motive?”

“For marginal types like would-be criminals, it is. They’re free here. The local authorities aren’t going to catch them on their own, and our police force is hamstrung, obviously.”

“So what can they do that’s so special?”

“As I said, live like gods. The last one we caught busted the bank at a casino in Vegas, then used predictive techniques you won’t discover for five generations to game your markets. Inside of a year, he was vastly rich.” He paused. His voice dropped an octave. “This guy wasn’t so interested in money, obviously.”

“When they’re finished, they can go home?”

“If they’re ever finished. The one in custody would probably have stayed here for a very long time, maybe across the span of more than one life. You can help us with him, Flynn.”

“And what do you want me to do?”

“If the body he’s in now were to die here on Earth without access to his dealer, he’d be in trouble. No new body, so his soul would be left to wander until it got drawn into a human fetus. He’d lose his memory of himself entirely. Become, in effect, human. Trapped forever in a primitive species.”

“Turn him over to our courts. Let us threaten him with the needle.”

“He was careful not to commit any of his crimes in death penalty states.”

“Drop him in a supermax.”

“He’ll escape. But he wouldn’t want to be tried in Texas.”

Flynn thought about that. Understood what Oltisis was driving at. “Okay,” he said, “let me spend some time with him. What’s his name?”

“Roger Ormond is what it says on his driver’s license.”

Diana said, “The identity’s perfect. It’s been built from deep within the system.”

“Take me to Roger Ormond. We’ll need to chat for a couple of minutes.”

They left Oltisis to his dark office and whatever thoughts a creature like that must have, and have to live with.

“We can disrobe,” the assistant said. “Roger isn’t allergic.”

“What’re you going to do?” Diana asked as she pulled off her jumpsuit.

“What Oltisis asked me to do.”

“He didn’t ask you anything.”

Flynn looked at her. “Oh, yeah, he did.”

They descended into a cellar that smelled of dust and heating oil. There was an ancient black velvet painting of JFK against one wall, beside it a rusting bicycle. There was also an old portable record player, and in one corner a dust-covered electric wheelchair, its seat well worn. Whoever had lived in that thing was probably damn glad to leave this life.

Across the room, a man sat in a cage made not of bars, but of a sort of shadowy haze that, as Flynn went closer, proved to be a mesh of fine wires. He was under a flood of glaring white light. His eyes were closed, his skin was flushed red, and he was covered with a sheen of sweat.

Flynn went into action immediately. “Mr. Ormond, I’m your attorney. We’re going to be getting you moving within the hour.”

“Excuse me.”

“You’ve been extradited to Texas.”

The face, which had been open and questioning, shut down tight. So he was scared. Good.

“I didn’t commit any crimes in Texas.”

Flynn remained affable. “Tell them that. I’ll stay with you as far as the airport, but after that you’re on your own. You’ll be assigned legal aid counsel at Huntsville.”

“A prison?”

“Guarded by cops like us. Who know the truth. You won’t escape. You’re gonna die in Texas, Mr. Ormond.”

He started to stand up. The cage around him glowed and sparked. He fell back into his seat. “I didn’t commit any crimes in Texas!”