Alien Hunter (Flynn Carroll)

by Whitley Strieber

  And then Abby sighed, and he turned to her but she was gone, and the breeze swept through the room, and a new kind of silence came with it.

  He leaped out of the bed.

  “What’s the matter?”

  “Abby!” He ran toward the window. “No!”

  She shook his shoulder. And he was back in the bed in the motel room. He hadn’t jumped up at all.

  “It’s a dream I’ve had before. I see the guy take her.”

  “Did you?”

  “Probably not. We did an Identi-Kit years ago. Posted the Wanted all over Texas. Nothing.”

  They held each other in the dark ocean of the night, in the unknown. Eventually, they slept again, each clutching the other as a lifeline. Flynn woke before dawn and checked the hotel corridor. Empty and silent. He watched the street for a time, standing back from the window. An old woman in a black coat walked a Collie mix. A bus passed.

  He looked back at Diana sprawled on the bed. Circumstances had thrown the two of them together, but he still belonged to Abby. He’d always belong to Abby. For the first time, he found himself imagining her death. Had she known what was happening? And what did happen? Was it slow, fast, painful? He should have asked Oltisis. Or maybe not. No, best not.

  Finally he sat in the room’s threadbare easy chair and turned on CNN, and watched the crawl on silent. A tanker had gone aground in the Azores. A movie star had gone berserk. Ford had a new computer system in its cars.

  And what the hell had just happened? He was working with a cop from another damn planet, holy God. Secret as hell and the stakes were high. If the criminal elements could be stopped, there would be open contact. Open. Everybody would know. The world would change, and look at that Oltisis, look at the way he was. That had to be the strangest and most wonderful person he’d ever met, and the most sinister. They’d defeated death. What did that mean? Conscious plasmas—is that what we were?

  Wonderful. The secret of the ages, and maybe the whole world was going to find out. Maybe we were going to defeat death.

  Except for one problem. Small problem. It was that this whole damn thing was going south. Way south. And the worst part of it was, he had no clear idea of a next move. More than anything that had happened so far, that disturbed him.

  He closed his eyes, but sleep didn’t come, not really. At best, it was the uneasy sleep of the soldier who can see the flicker of artillery on the horizon. Or it was the sleep of the condemned, the mind searching for last dreams that did not come.

  In its gradual, stately way, the light changed, dawn rolling in from the east. Diana snored softly. The minutes passed, one by one.

  So he was a big genius. Wonderful, he was so glad. Too bad that he had run out of ideas.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  The glow from the signs outside finally faded into the uniform ray light of a cloud-choked sunrise. When Flynn parted the curtain again, he saw flecks of snow tumbling past.

  It was six twenty, meaning that they’d been here for over five hours. They would have to go soon, but she was still sleeping. Her fists were clenched, the blanket pulled tightly around her neck.

  When he’d first met Diana, she’d seemed out of her depth and too arrogant to know it, but now she looked small and tragic, lying on the bed all clutched into herself.

  “I’m not asleep,” she said. She opened her eyes. “Did you sleep?”

  “Some. Not a lot.”

  “Same here. Not a lot.”

  She got out of bed, indifferent to her nakedness. He was not indifferent to it. She crossed into the bathroom, lithe and perfect, a dancer.

  The shower came on. He listened to it, but as he watched her shadow behind the curtain, he thought of Abby in the shower. She’d liked to sing, Abby. Her voice was a peal of bells.

  The shower curtain flew back and Diana came out. “Yours,” she said.

  When he undressed, she took no notice.

  He showered in silence. He was mapping out an exit strategy from Chicago. Keep it simple, make it quick. But where to go?

  “I need a laptop,” she told him as he dressed.

  “We can do that at a Best Buy or a Staples.”

  “That’s numero uno. We also need disposable cell phones. Every time we use one, we need to bust it up and toss the remains. No more than twenty-second calls, and only if absolutely, absolutely necessary. NRO can pull down a cell call in about thirty seconds from anywhere in the world, and we need to assume that our guys are even better.”

  “Okay, here’s my part of this. First, if our friend doesn’t get out of that house fast, he’s done. If it hasn’t already happened. The perp is ahead of him and way ahead of us, and the frank truth is, survival is the issue. So I’ve been thinking about transportation. What’s the safest way to run like hell? Planes are out. No way through security without showing some kind of ID. The train is better. They take cash and we can hide out in a compartment. But a compartment is also a trap, so that’s out. Obviously buses are too vulnerable. My bottom line: we buy a car off a lot for cash. There’ll be no record of the transaction until the title hits the state department of transportation. So we’ve got about two days to go as far as we can.”

  “Then the car becomes identifiable.”

  “If we’re still in Illinois it does. But that’s not where we’re gonna be, not unless the trail of that tiger leads here, which I very much doubt.”

  “The trail of the tiger?”

  “I think it’s our best shot. That animal has records. Where we’re gonna go is where it was last in the hands of its real owners. That’s our starting point.”

  “Let me ask you this. What if we absolutely, completely and totally cannot find the tiger? What then?”

  “We go to Plan B.”

  “Which is?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “Jesus.”

  “Ninety percent of detective work is having no idea, eight percent is being wrong, two percent is luck. You enter a crime scene, there’s a dead guy. His wife, the usual suspect, is alibied and clueless. It feels like there’s no next step. But you find one. You take it. Usually small, and usually a dead end. So you feel your way along until you locate another step, if there is one, which usually there is not. That’s it. That’s being a detective.”

  “But you solve your crimes?”

  “We have a good closing rate in Menard. Better than a lot of places. Mostly you solve the crime because the perp is a moron, which is why this case is such a problem. Our guy is not only better equipped than we are, he’s smarter.”

  Dressed, they went downstairs. In the elevator he said, “We walk in opposite directions on Diversey. You go north, I go south. Get on the first bus you see. I’ll get on it, too, next stop. Do not sit together. We both get off at the El.”

  The doors opened, they entered the compact lobby and checked out. She left while he looked at leaflets. Then he left. He made no effort to case the street. If they were made, there was no point. Escape would not be possible, not a second time.

  As he walked, he looked for a bus stop, found one, then waited. In a few minutes a bus pulled up. It was packed, which was all to the good. When he got on, for a moment he didn’t see her. Then he did, standing toward the back, deep in the crowd. He grabbed a bar and stayed in the front. They traveled four stops to the El, then he got off, along with most of the other passengers.

  He saw her again on the El platform. They didn’t acknowledge each other. When the El came, they both entered the same car. Three other people did, too, a man in a gray overcoat with a fur cap on his head, a woman with a blanket-covered stroller, and a girl being led by a Seeing Eye dog. Ordinary people or hit squad?

  Farther down in the car, Diana sat reading a paper. That was a nice touch, he hadn’t thought of that.

  Looking up at the route map, he decided to get off in Skokie. No idea why. It was just a random name. No plan was the best plan.

  Stops came and went. All of the people who’d gotten on with them were n
ow off, which was good. Hopeful. Unless they’d been cycled out, of course. Who knew what level of resources they were dealing with? Did the perp have ten confederates or fifty? No way to know.

  When the train stopped in Skokie, he got off. She followed. Downstairs, there was a coffee shop. He took a seat at the counter. In a situation like this, it was always a mistake not to eat, so he ordered eggs, toast, and sausage. At the far end of the counter, she ate, too.

  She’d probably seen the same dealership from the windows of the train that he had, but he left first anyway. If there was another one he hadn’t spotted, he didn’t want to take the chance that she’d go there instead.

  It was a twenty-minute walk, and he didn’t like the way it exposed them. Nothing to do about it, though.

  As he pushed his way into the warm dealership showroom full of gleaming Chryslers, the only salesman in the place appeared, an Indian man with tired eyes and a cranked-up smile.

  “I’m looking for something I can drive off.”

  The salesman sized him up. “Well, let me show you your car,” he said. The plaster smile didn’t change. The tiredness in the eyes maybe got a little deeper. This man was far from home with a blizzard on the way, and Flynn could see his wife and kids around him, needy ghosts. Most of the world was like this man, keeping on because what else were you going to do? Flynn knew that there would be no savior for Mr. Asnadi.

  Mr. Asnadi tried to get him to look at some recent models.

  “I got a budget, man. Two grand.”

  “We can do that. There’s a Dynasty—”

  “You can do better. What about that Shelby over there?”

  There was a Mitsubishi V-6 in the Dodge Shelby, and it was turbocharged. A fast car if you needed it and he would need it, that he knew.

  “This is a fine car. We’ve certified it, you can see. But there’s not much wiggle room.”

  The sticker said three thousand one hundred dollars. There was wiggle room. The way the tires were sitting told Flynn that there was massive amounts of it. The car hadn’t rolled in at least six months, and you weren’t even going to get a kid to buy an old gray Shelby.

  “I’ll give you two grand cash now. That’s my only offer.”

  “For two grand, we have this Avenger—”

  “The Shelby. Two grand. Or I walk right now.”

  He sighed. “I have to clear it with my manager.”

  “No you don’t. You’re the only guy here. You want to try sitting in a back room drinking coffee while I stew, then come out and bullshit me more? Ain’t gonna happen.”

  “Let’s do the paperwork.”

  Twenty minutes later, Flynn and Diana were driving away. “Beautiful,” she said, looking at the cracked dash.

  “It’s fast and we might need that. Plus front-wheel drive and reasonable tires. It’s worth about eight hundred bucks, but I paid two grand to do the deal quickly.”

  His instinct was to travel, but they went back into the Loop and spent an hour dipping more ATMs. Under no circumstances could they use plastic once they were outside of Chicago.

  When they had sixteen grand between them, they headed out Eighty toward Fifty-Five. He wanted to get far away from here as fast as possible, and also out from under the storm, which was fast approaching.

  In Joliet, they found a Best Buy. They picked up laptops. She also purchased a hardware firewall. “We leave the wireless connections turned off. When we take these online, it can only be with a wired Ethernet with the firewall between us and the connection.” They got a GPS. “We use it only if necessary.”

  “It doesn’t emit a signal,” he said.

  “Everything emits a signal. Our signals detection units routinely reproduce the images on GPS instruments being used by the Taliban. It’s one of the ways we aim our drones.”

  “I’m an old-fashioned cop, don’t forget that. Gumshoeing around asking people questions. So don’t let this electronic crap trip me up.”

  “That’s why I’m telling you.”

  At a 7-Eleven, they got disposable cell phones.

  Back in the car, she explained, “Any time we use any phone, the computers or the GPS, anything that connects us to the world electronically, we immediately move on. So don’t, like, decide to surf the net before bed or whatever.”

  “Good enough.” When it came to computers and computer security, she was, thank God, clearly in control. “Now I have a question for you. It’s time to open up. We’re past the bullshit. I know the big secret. So now I want to know if there are any support personnel anywhere who could help us.”

  “I don’t think there’s a single soul.”

  “What about the stakeout team across the street?”

  “Garden-variety FBI surveillance unit. Don’t know a thing.”

  “Not very good, either, given that they let a hostile tail pick us up. What about your NSA supervisor? You’re not in the office. He must be aware of that.”

  “Neither are you, and what does Captain Parker know?”

  “Point taken.” He drove on southward under the deepening sky. Snow blew across the road in writhing ribbons. The car’s heater screamed. As he drove, he watched both the sky and the road behind them. The cloud cover looked to be at about two thousand feet, so any chopper that might be shadowing them would stay in the cloud. The road was a different story, the road he could see.

  In an excess of caution, he pulled the car off suddenly, tires screaming.

  “What’s happening?”

  He said nothing. Ahead was a crossroad anchored by an Exxon Station, a Jack in the Box, and a Holiday Inn Express.

  He pulled into the gas station.

  “How about a warning once in a while? You scared the hell out of me.”

  “We don’t need gas. I’m watching our back.”

  For eleven minutes, nothing else came in off the interstate. Then an eighteen-wheeler appeared, air brakes hissing, and headed for the truck pumps.

  “Okay, I think we’re clean and we’re in an isolated area. Now what we need to do is this. First, we’re gonna go online, both of us, and see if we can find any report anywhere of a lost or stolen Siberian tiger. At the same time that we do that, we’re gonna put these people in front of us where we can see them.”

  “Put them in front of us?”

  “We’re going online flying flags. Wifi. No firewall. Looking for a Siberian tiger.”

  “They’ll find us.”

  “What they’ll find is the motel. We’ll be backed off, watching. But first there’s another couple of chores.”

  “Which are?”

  “You’re going to learn some new driving techniques. A few moves, as much as I can get across in an hour. And you are damn well going to become proficient with that little popgun you’ve got.”

  “I don’t like guns. But I’ll use it if I have to.”

  “You will fall in love with it. Worship it. Because right now, Diana, our guns are our gods.”

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  He’d taken them down a long country road and pulled off in a tree-choked dip just beyond a small bridge. “Let me explain this vehicle.”

  “I’m a good driver.”

  “This is a front-wheel-drive vehicle. Better for winter, but you’re not going to be able to do certain maneuvers. Normally, rear-wheel drive is the way to go, but this has an advantage in bad weather. It’s fast, but it also has a lightweight steering pump. This means that the fluid is going to foam if we do tight turns at high speed. Expect the steering to become extremely heavy. Also, rubber brake lines. They could expand and so you need to assume that you could lose your brakes, too.”

  “So it’ll be unsteerable and it won’t stop. You’d better drive.”

  “If I’m incapacitated, you’ll have to. Or if I’m done.”

  “What do you mean ‘done’?”

  “You got a sixty-six percent casualty rate going so far, Diana.”

  “I’m sorry. I’m just—” She shook her head.

&nbs
p; He changed seats with her, then taught her a few basics, such as how to find the apex of a turn and when to start accelerating out of one, and how to execute a reasonable 180.

  On a quiet country road she was barely passable. Under pressure, she was going to forget everything. He didn’t even mention the bootlegger’s turn. If she needed to execute a maneuver like that, she was already caught, so what was the point?

  He gave up on driving and went to handgun skills. They walked a short distance into a frozen field. “You ever fired your pistol? At all?”

  “Yes. No. Once. One session.”

  “The most important thing in pistol shooting is understanding just how inaccurate your weapon is. People are accurate with pistols from distance only in the movies.”

  “How close do you need to be?”

  “With the weapons we’re using, a few yards is the outside.”

  “That’s all?”

  “Targets will be in motion and so will we. You need to get in as close as you can, is the bottom line. A couple of feet, or even a contact shot, is best.”

  “I did my shooting on a range. There was a trainer.”

  “The range is a dream world. If you’re shooting, your mind is going to be too focused on the act to remember much of anything else. That’s what practice is about. When you’re under pressure, you’ll go on automatic pilot, not lose your head.”

  “What’s the most important thing I need to know, then?”

  “Avoid lifting the barrel as you pull the trigger. But you won’t, not entirely, so you need to aim for the largest part of your target that’s worth hitting. This is the chest just below the neck. The advantage of this shot is that it does anatomical damage that affects the arms. With a heart shot, your opponent can get off one, maybe two trigger pulls before he’s done. Not with this one.”

  “What about the head? Just shoot him in the head.”

  “You’re going to miss, and once you have missed, you are going to manage the weapon badly. That’s what happened to Mike.”

  “He was highly trained.”

  “So am I. That’s why I know what happened to him.”