Alien Sleeping Beauty

by Zara Zenia

I was desperate for a lead. I didn’t know where Ariana was, but I hoped she wasn’t afraid. I hoped that she didn’t think that I had something to do with her apparent abduction.

  I frantically dialed my twin brother Lortnam first. He would know what to do, or, at least that was the hope.

  He answered on the first ring, sounding unbelievably cheery.

  “Hello?” There was a hoppy bounce to his voice.

  “Lortnam?” My demeanor was the polar opposite of his state of serenity.

  “Jinurak?” He sounded concerned but not worried. “Is everything alright?” He picked up the tone of my voice immediately.

  “She’s…someone…Ariana…taken…”

  “Easy now,” Lortnam said. “Just calm down and try to relax. What are you talking about?”

  “Someone took her!” I shouted.

  “Who?” Lortnam asked.

  I exhaled a frustrated puff of air. “Ariana.”

  “Isn’t she supposed to be landing soon from her flight?” Lortnam asked. His tone was openly confused.

  “Someone took her from the flight,” I declared.

  “You mean, someone took her as in an abduction?”

  “Yes!” I clarified.

  “How can you be certain?”

  “Because Vas told me that when my associates went to the airport to pick her up and bring her to my palace, she wasn’t on the plane.”

  “Was she on the manifest?” Lortnam asked.

  “Yes,” I said and nodded, pacing around the room again.

  “Was it a private plane? Was she the only one on it aside from your advisor team?”

  “No,” I said. “It was a commercial flight.”

  “So, her plane was hijacked?” Lortnam was annoying me with his rapid-fire round of questions, but I knew that he was just attempting to gather more information.

  “Vas is not certain that the whole plane was hijacked,” I clarified. “He thinks that she was taken by someone after they deboarded. Someone who might have pretended to be a part of my staff team to draw her away and trick her to convince her to go with them.”

  “But who would do that?” I could practically hear him frowning contemplatively.

  “I have no idea.”

  I felt like I was slamming my head repeatedly into a brick wall and getting nothing in return other than a splitting headache.

  “And you are sure that she was abducted?” Lortnam quizzed.

  “Of course, I’m sure,” I exclaimed. “She isn’t here, is she?”

  “Do you know that she got on the plane at all?” Lortnam asked. “What if she got cold feet and is still at home?”

  I squeezed my eyes shut and touched the bridge of my nose. “No. She got on the plane. She called me and described everything before they took off. She was extremely excited and couldn’t wait to get to Baltimore.”

  “Hmm.”

  “What?” I held my breath.

  “Have you considered getting in touch with David?”

  “David?” I asked. “David who?”

  “Yadav of course.”

  “Oh, right,” I said with an eye roll. I guessed in my flustered state of mind, the idea of reaching out to our special agent crimes expert hadn’t even crossed my mind.

  “And the local authorities too,” Lortnam mentioned. “Maybe they can put out an APB…All Points Bulletin to be on the lookout for her as a potentially endangered person.”

  “I know what an APB is,” I snapped, and then quickly redacted. “I’m sorry, Lortnam. I’m just a little stressed out over the situation.”

  “I would be too if I were you, brother,” he said gently. There was kindness in his tone that made me relax a little.

  “I will contact Yadav and the local authorities,” I said.

  “I can reach out to our brothers and enlist their help too,” Lortnam said. “Perhaps we can all get together for a briefing.”

  “That sounds like a good plan to contact them, but I think we can wait on the briefing until I get some leads about what might have happened to Ariana,” I said.

  “It sounds like we are both going to be busy in the interim,” Lortnam said.

  I took a deep breath and wandered over to the window. The bustling city was all around me. People out there went on about their day, completely oblivious to the struggle I was facing.

  “Let me know if you hear anything,” I told Lortnam before we hung up.

  “Of course, you know I will.” He sounded genuine enough.

  It was Lortnam’s idea in the first place to invite Ariana for a visit. I knew that he couldn’t be behind the abduction. Lortnam could be a strange fellow sometimes, but he wasn’t devious. He was my twin brother. I knew that I could trust him with my life.

  I hung up the phone and decided to call Yadav before the local authorities. I sat down at my computer and scrolled through my list of contacts until I found him. I dialed the number. Yadav answered on the second ring.

  “This is David Yadav,” he declared in a professional voice.

  I cleared my throat. “Hey Yadav, this is Prince Jinurak.”

  “Oh.” He sounded surprised. “How can I help you today, Prince Jinurak.”

  “Unfortunately, the reason for my call is not a pleasant one,” I said. I wanted to cut the small talk. It was time to get to the bottom of Ariana’s disappearance.

  “I would imagine not, sir, I don’t generally get calls from the Trilyn Princes unless things have gone to shit. What can I do for you?” Yadav asked.

  “There is a human girl missing,” I explained. “Her name is Ariana Mason. She’s nineteen years old. She is a freelance poet and lives in upstate New York. She was on flight 4530 with Skyview Airlines. Something happened in between her boarding and her landing. She was not on the plane when my advisor teams went to pick her up at the Baltimore Airport at eleven this morning.”

  “Well that is peculiar,” Yadav said, stating the obvious.

  “My brother Lortnam told me to give you a call and that you might be able to be of service in finding out where she might be.”

  “Do you have reason to suspect foul play?” Yadav asked.

  “Yes.” I didn’t skip a beat. “I absolutely suspect foul play in this situation.”

  “Can you provide a description of her?”

  “She has medium length chestnut colored hair and blue eyes,” I mentioned. “I can send over a picture of her for you if that helps.”

  “Indeed, it will,” Yadav said.

  I wanted to be as active as possible in pursuit of this investigation. I wanted to get the ball rolling. I knew that time was an important factor here. The window of opportunity of finding her alive narrowly altered the longer she remained missing.

  I was confident in Yadav’s capabilities. He was a special agent and a computer crimes expert. He worked for the planetary government’s intercontinental law enforcement division.

  He was somewhat of a prodigy. He was a computer genius, far more equipped to infiltrate the system than I would ever be able to achieve on my own. He was also kind hearted and genuine. He was tech savvy from all angles, and he came from a long line of family members who also pursued law enforcement out of sheer idealism.

  “This woman was on a flight from upstate New York to visit me for several weeks and I am desperate to find any leads as to who might have taken her,” I admitted.

  “I have the resources to crack the case,” Yadav said. “Will you give me a few minutes to go through the airline’s manifest system as well as their tracking system and any issues with the air traffic controllers at the time?”

  “Sure,” I said.

  “And you said she was on Skyview Airlines, flight 4530?” Yadav’s tone was all business.

  “That’s correct.” My heart pounded in my chest, but I felt a shroud of optimism blanket over me now that I was talking to Yadav.

  “I am going to see what I can do,” he said confidently.

  “Thank you so much,” I said with a sigh. I wa
s already exhausted, and the mission wasn’t even underway yet. “I am going to contact Baltimore police as well as the TSA agents at the airport to determine whether they witnessed any suspicious activity.”

  “Okay sounds good to me,” Yadav said. I could hear his fingers clicking away at his computer. He sounded distracted now, but I knew that it was because he was immersed in the case, concentrating hard.

  “Well I’ll let you get to work,” I said, ready to hang up and see what I could accomplish on my end.

  “I’ll call you as soon as I have some leads,” Yadav promised.

  I hung up and glanced out the window again. “Where are you, Ariana?” I whispered to the world. I didn’t have an answer yet, but I was determined to figure out where she went.

  At that moment, Vas walked through the door of my office along with a couple of my other advisors.

  “Hello Prince,” he said with a diplomatic nod. He was carrying a tablet with him, scrolling through.

  “What have you found out so far?” I asked.

  “Well…” he chuckled nervously. “It appears as if I was wrong about the plane landing at the Baltimore airport.”

  “What?” I was astounded. My pulse drummed nervously through my ears. “Where did it go?”

  “It appears that it was re-routed.” Vas flickered his gaze to me before glancing back down at his tablet.

  “Is that just another word for hijacked that you are trying to say to appease me and keep me from losing my temper?” I asked in a grizzly tone.

  Vas exchanged a glance with my advisors. “Not exactly, but sort of…”

  I shifted my weight and narrowed my eyes. “What about the other people who were on the plane? It was a commercial flight?”

  “Apparently when the stop was made in Washington, D.C., it was only a handful of people who got off the plane. The rest stayed on board and the plane flew to its correct location of the Baltimore Airport. That’s why we were having difficulty figuring out what happened before. We hadn’t realized that the plane had landed somewhere else before it landed in D.C. Whoever did the hijacking wanted to make sure that the plane went to its correct location in the end.”

  “Who got off the plane?” I asked, knowing in my heart the answer already.

  Vas wouldn’t look at me. “We are still trying to determine if Ariana was one of them, sir.”

  “Do you think she was perhaps confused and thought that she was at the Baltimore Airport?” I asked.

  “It’s a possibility,” Vas said.

  “Do you think someone paid off the pilots to make the quick stop elsewhere?” I asked.

  “We are looking into that too.”

  “So now what?” I asked in a more frustrated tone than I intended to sound.

  Vas inhaled sharply. “We are getting ready to make the thirty-mile trek down to D.C. to see if we can get the TSA agents working and the Intercontinental team at the airport to pull surveillance for us.”

  “That’s a good start,” I said with a satisfied nod. I finally felt like we were getting somewhere.

  “Thank you.” Vas nodded and seemed relieved to get my approval.

  “I have reached out to Yadav and he is working on things from his end too,” I mentioned.

  “Excellent.”

  “I am going to contact the Baltimore police and get them involved,” I said.

  “We will be in touch once we get to the Dulles Airport.” Vas stopped scrolling through his tablet and shut it off.

  “Okay thanks.” I gave him a swift nod as he exited with my advisors.

  I picked up the phone and took a deep breath. I suddenly felt faint. I was dizzy. My head was spinning. I sat quickly sat down and cradled my head in my hands.

  “Pull yourself together, Jinurak.” I gritted my teeth and determined that I wasn’t going to allow myself the time to have a panic attack.

  Ariana was in trouble. I knew that something had happened to her. I had to help her. She was vulnerable and shy.

  She needed me. I would find her even if the odds were stacked against me. The perpetrator was bound to get sloppy and make a mistake somewhere. At least, that was my hope. Once that happened, I would be ready to swoop in and pounce to take care of the situation.

  I picked up my phone again and dialed the local police. I was put through to a detective who sounded partially engaged in the conversation.

  “So, she was supposed to get on the plane, but she didn’t?” he asked.

  I shook my head and pinched the bridge of my nose. “No. She got on the plane. It was rerouted to Washington, D.C. when it should have gone to Baltimore. It made a stop in D.C., then went on to Baltimore. When the flight landed, Ariana wasn’t on it.”

  There was a brief pause on the other end. “And the air traffic controllers didn’t pick up on the fact that the plane was landing in a different location than it was supposed to?”

  I knew it sounded outlandish, but it was the truth as I knew it. “Perhaps the captain told the air traffic controllers in advance that they were going to make the second stop.”

  The detective coughed. “That rarely happens. Are you sure that weather wasn’t a deterrent?”

  “I can’t say for sure.” I inhaled sharply.

  I glanced out the window. Clouds secluded the sun, but it was nothing more than a gray sky. There wasn’t any snow, rain or sleet. No thunder crashed overhead. I had a difficult time believing that weather could have been a factor. A pilot wouldn’t land in a different location just for a cloudy sky.

  “We will take the woman’s name and head over to the airport to ask the TSA agents on duty if they saw anything suspicious,” the detective said.

  “Thank you so much,” I said and sighed with relief. “Do you mind if I accompany you there?”

  There was another doubtful pause. “Normally, we can’t treat this as a missing person’s case until twenty-four hours in, but since the situation is different here and she boarded the plane, but never got off, we will rev up this investigation quickly.”

  He still hadn’t answered my question about tagging along for the airport visit. I was the type who needed to be in control of the situation. I felt like if I wasn’t out there in the trenches with the rest of the troops, I wasn’t contributing and then I felt guilty.

  “At this time please leave the investigative work to the professionals,” the detective said.

  I clenched my jaw but didn’t protest. I didn’t want to get on this guy’s bad side when he was the one who was going to help me find Ariana.

  “Of course,” I said with a diplomatic nod, even though he couldn’t see me.

  “Call me if you get any leads though,” the detective mentioned.

  “And you will do the same for me?”

  Another hesitating silence that floored me.

  “Yes, we will be in touch,” he said.

  I hung up and felt like I was making headway, but the progress wasn’t going as speedily as I had hoped. I still hadn’t heard from Ariana. I picked up my phone and dialed her cell number again. It cut straight to voicemail, just like all the other million times I had attempted to reach her.

  I didn’t know what to do. I needed to get some fresh air. I couldn’t stay cooped up in this office. I needed to proactively engage myself in this investigation, even though there were people onboard and helping me.

  My phone rang again, startling me. I jumped nearly a foot into the air.

  “Hello?” It was my twin brother Lortnam again.

  “Have you heard anything?” he asked.

  “I’ve been making some calls, but nothing yet,” I said.

  “I’m sorry.” His tone sounded genuine.

  “She won’t answer her phone either.”

  “Really?” Lortnam sounded as perplexed as felt inside.

  “Nothing else makes sense.”

  “The pilots must have been in on the plan to land in D.C. first,” Lortnam said. “You can’t reach the cockpit. It’s locked once the flight takes of
f.”

  “That’s true,” I said with a contemplative nod. “Maybe they were paid off to do the abductor a favor?”

  “I’m just trying to rack my brain and figure out what might have happened,” Lortnam said.

  “You and me both.” I heaved a heavy sigh, but the weight of the world still rested on my shoulders.

  “Kelly has a theory,” Lortnam mentioned casually.

  “Is that right?” I wasn’t sure whether to take it with a grain of salt once I heard it.

  “Yes. She is actually pretty inquisitive, Jinurak.” There was a slight trace of defensiveness in his tone.

  Kelly could be snarky sometimes. I didn’t like her at first, but she was growing on me. I knew that she loved Lortnam and it wasn’t superficial, but I still felt like at this point in the investigation into Ariana’s disappearance, I needed to keep my guard up.

  “Mm-hm,” I said.

  “She was a private investigator before we married, remember?” Lortnam said.

  “Oh yes,” I chuckled, “I remember.”

  “She was hired by that electronic engineer to learn more about me at first,” Lortnam said.

  “What was that lady’s name again?” I asked.

  “Nora. Nora Morse.”

  I walked outside and relished in the cool breeze as it tickled softly against my cheek. “Does she think that Nora had something to do with this?” I asked.

  “She said it’s worth looking into,” Lortnam said.

  “Well she still knows what it’s like to be a private investigator,” I mentioned. “Can’t she help us out?”

  “She is willing to do what is needed, but if you will recall, Nora tried to kill the both of us, so I’m a little bit leery of letting her near this in person.”

  “Right, I remember.” I felt more disappointed than I expected to be.

  “I will talk to Kelly and see what she can do to get some momentum going in this situation,” Lortnam said. “Maybe her friend Mei can help. I shall ask.”

  “Thank you.” I smiled and hung up.

  At least there were people out there who were willing to stick their necks out and get the work done to find Ariana. I didn’t want to give up hope yet. She was out there somewhere, just waiting on me to come and rescue her.

  I wanted to be that gallant and noble man she needed, but I felt helpless. I didn’t even know where to start. That’s why I had enlisted the professionals.