Trespassers: a science-fiction novel

by Todd Wynn

  Jin held up the monitor. “I found her.”

  “Which way?” Dexim asked.

  “North.”

  Their hopeful wandering suddenly had purpose. Jin pointed the way, and Lyntic searched her map for the right roads to get them there.

  “I told you it worked,” Tobi gloated.

  “Remember,” Dexim said, as he turned onto a surface street, “she has no idea what’s going on. We have to approach her gently. We can’t give her too much information too fast.”

  “I don’t see what’s wrong with just grabbing her, getting out of here, and explaining everything later,” Lyntic grumbled.

  “And that’s why you’re going to wait in the car,” Dexim snapped back. “I assume everyone else here knows what the word gentle means.”

  Tobi and Jin nodded. There was another reason Dexim didn’t want Lyntic to be part of their first contact with Sara. Frankly put, girls didn’t like Lyntic—at least not at first. She made a first impression that caused men to melt and women to fume. She would be best left in the car.

  26

  The Waiting Game

  Web sat at the table against the wall in Room 215, with the prototype transmitter in front of him, still humming, still transmitting. His only mission now was to ensure that it kept doing this. With a soldering gun and a screwdriver he was strengthening some of the components. With a possible fish on the line, he would have to make any necessary adjustments on the fly. Even if the transmission was dropped for a few seconds, they would run the risk of Dexim’s team picking up the real heartbeat in a different direction, and that could put the whole mission at risk.

  Stewart looked from Web to the iPad on the bed, which displayed live images from the surveillance cameras.

  “I can’t see anything in the elevator,” Stewart said.

  New Guy left his position on the lobby sofa and walked into the elevator. He found a brown cat curled up in the corner, blocking the camera. When New Guy poked at him, the cat stretched, expecting to be petted. New Guy rolled his eyes as he scooped up the house pet and relocated him. “It’s all clear, now,” he said, after checking the broadcast feed on his iPhone to make sure the camera was working.

  New Guy returned to his position on the sofa, where he had a good view of the lobby. From this vantage point, he could also see the utility closet where Michael-James and a cousin were hiding. He had a .45 filled with nonlethal prototype dart capsules called dreamers concealed in his waistband and one with deadly hollow points, just in case. The development of a tranquilizer round that could be fired from a standard .45 caliber handgun had been in the works for years. In fact, it was still in the works. The eight rounds loaded in New Guy’s gun were still in the beta phase and not released for commercial, military, or government use. Cutting-edge weaponry was just another perk of a top-secret agency such as the Limestone Deposit Survey Group.

  As New Guy sat on the sofa, waiting for alien trespassers to step through the door, all he could think of was his biological father. New Guy didn’t reflect on his bio-father very often. It was as if he had forgotten the man. He had been too busy trying to live up to his stepfather’s marine code.

  New Guy’s life had grown into a mission to impress his stepfather. His assignment to this top-level government agency would certainly do that.

  But forgotten memories of his bio-father had been flowing back into his mind ever since his first alien encounter yesterday. He remembered holding his father’s hand, riding on his shoulders, sitting beside him in a dark movie theatre—things he never would have done with his marine stepfather. Why were so many buried memories suddenly flooding back to the surface?

  Suddenly, it hit him: it was this job. He wanted to share these unbelievable experiences with someone . . . someone who would understand. They wouldn’t wash with the rigid marine. But he could have shared them with his biological father if he were still alive. New Guy felt like a little kid again, hungry for his father’s affection. Who would have thought alien encounters could have struck such an emotional blow to a hardened military specialist?

  Looking for a distraction, he pulled a magazine off the coffee table: Quilts from the Nineteenth Century. It was going to be a long day.

  Upstairs, Stewart was standing at the window, gazing out. He knew all the ways that this mission could go wrong, but he was trying to focus on the few ways it could go right. These trespassers were one huge question mark. He didn’t know who they were, where they came from, or whom they were tracking. But if this was as big as he hoped, they would probably stop at nothing to avoid capture. That made them dangerous.

  Stewart felt an arm brush across his chest. It was Mindy, reaching for a muffin on the window sill. Her body was extremely close to his, and his immediate inclination was to move back. But out of curiosity he held his ground. She leaned against him as if he were an inviting tree, almost resting her weight on him as she rummaged through the basket of muffins that the hotel manager had provided for their stakeout.

  She was in his space without asking, without saying excuse me, without mentioning it at all. Was he going to wake up one morning to find her underwear on his bathroom floor, coils of her hair clinging to his tub, and her toothbrush next to his? You’d think with an alien ambush unfolding, there would be better things for Stewart to concern himself with. But he had a right to keep an eye on any claims being made.

  “Yeah, you wrote it on the back of your card,” Mindy answered, as she pulled a muffin from the basket, responding to a question that Grizzly must have asked.

  “What did I put?” Grizzly asked. “Make sure I gave you the right one.”

  Stewart watched Mindy’s hand slide into his shirt pocket and drag out a business card. There it was again: familiarity.

  Mindy read an e-mail address off the back of the card, and Grizzly nodded. Stewart didn’t remember taking Grizzly’s card, though. Mindy slid the mysterious card back into Stewart’s pocket, as if it were her own personal filing cabinet. A thought occurred to him: he never used his shirt pocket. He found shirt pockets useless. Anything he ever put into one had fallen out as a result of his tendency to be too active and the pocket’s tendency to be too loose. Suddenly, he got it. Grizzly had given the card to Mindy. She was indeed using him as a filing cabinet.

  Karl Bruner stared up through the windshield, watching the red light that hung above his government-issue Ford Taurus. He was alone in the car, and that’s how he liked it. The only thing on his list at the moment was to find Stewart Faulkner of the Limestone Deposit Survey Group and ask him a few questions. Bruner had no idea what to expect. For all he knew, this Stewart could be a real hands-on geologist, with an Indiana Jones-style fedora. Or he could be an overweight Washington fat cat, wearing a cheap, white suit. Chances were good that he was neither of these.

  Bruner already had Stewart’s location—the Juniper Hotel—and he was headed there now. Tracking down Stewart had been easy for him. Bruner was a darn good investigator, and if he couldn’t locate a government agent out on official business, he might as well hang it up. On this particular search, Bruner’s secretary had been able to do most of the work. Bruner had her perform a telephone feeler search for Stewart Faulkner. This was a simple, low-tech approach that always worked. It involved calling area hotels, restaurants, and stores, inquiring about the person in question—in this case, Stewart Faulkner. When Bruner had his secretary on the phone, he also asked whether that name meant anything to her. It didn’t.

  It had taken only twenty minutes for Bruner to hear back from his secretary with the name Juniper Hotel. The desk clerk had said Stewart was there. Once again, a small amount of focused effort had paid off.

  Red turned to green, and Bruner’s foot eased off the brake pedal. His hands played leapfrog on the top of the steering wheel as he guided the car into a left turn and pulled up behind a Ford Edge—the same Ford Edge driven by Dexim. Bruner was bumper to bumper with a car full of aliens. This wasn’t the first time he had been so close witho
ut knowing it. And it wouldn’t be the last. After a block of construction, the one-way street widened out into two lanes, and Bruner accelerated past. He would be the first to reach the bed-and-breakfast. To Dexim, the driver who had just passed was another face in the crowd—not a one-man alien search party.

  “We may not be able to approach her right away,” Dexim explained, keeping both eyes on the road. “If she’s with someone else, or if she’s in a public place, we may just have to wait and see. We need a situation that gives her an opportunity to trust us.”

  “Graaaaabbbbb herrrr,” Lyntic sang under her breath.

  “We’re not going to grab her,” Dexim countered, “unless it is a last, last, last resort. How we handle this is going to reflect on all of us. If we can’t win her over, we can’t get her memory back.”

  “We can win her over,” Lyntic said. “I can win her over.”

  “I’m sure you can.”

  “Right up there.” Jin’s finger darted between Dexim and Lyntic, pointing at the left side of the street. “It’s one of those buildings.” Jin watched the digital tracking arrow slowly adjust as Dexim rolled past the buildings. It swung ninety degrees to stay on the Juniper Hotel. “That one,” Jin announced. “That’s it.”

  Dexim made a U-turn and pulled along the curb. It was exactly what Dexim had hoped: a quiet hotel on a quiet street.

  “This must be where she’s living now,” Dexim theorized. “We’ll just go in and take a look. If anyone asks, we’re meeting a friend, and leave it at that.”

  Jin and Tobi nodded. Dexim could tell by the sour look on Lyntic’s face that she would follow his directive to stay in the car.

  27

  The Ambush

  Inside the Juniper Hotel, Dexim, Tobi, and Jin were welcomed by the desk clerk with a friendly hello.

  “I have a possible match. Three males,” New Guy whispered. They fit the description given by the pilot.

  Upstairs, all eyes turned to Stewart. This was coming sooner than any of them expected. “Be ready,” Stewart said. “This could be it.”

  Grizzly and a nephew stood against the wall. They psyched themselves up on cue and seemed to be ready for anything. Web was focused on the transmitter. It was crucial that he keep the signal alive.

  Mindy had a sudden realization: alien trespassers—criminals, no less—were on their way up. Damn, this room is small, she thought. What would she do if things went bad? She could probably jump from the second floor, but the window wasn’t the kind that opened. Perhaps she could smash through the window with a chair if she had to. She imagined herself swinging the heavy piece of furniture at the window. No, she quickly decided. She wasn’t going to be the special agent who threw a chair through a window and sprang from the second floor in a hail of shattered glass, leaving her team behind as soon as she heard a knock on the door. She would stand her ground and do whatever needed to be done. If she had to wield that chair, it would be to fight, not to flee.

  On the iPad, Stewart watched the three figures walk past the front desk and right past the elevator. The tracker in Jin’s hands was leading them down the hallway to the first-floor rooms, directly below Web’s decoy signal.

  “They can’t tell the elevation, yet,” Stewart explained.

  As Jin made his way farther down the hall, he tipped the tracking device toward the ceiling and the arrow aligned.

  “The second floor,” he said.

  Back in the lobby, New Guy couldn’t believe his eyes. “I think Bruner’s here,” he whispered.

  “What!?” Stewart exclaimed, to no one in particular.

  The hairs on the back of Mindy’s neck stood up. Her jaw muscles clenched. Her emotions were taking Stewart’s lead and magnifying it. Any hairline crack in his armor looked to her like a gaping hole.

  “What?” Stewart repeated.

  “Yeah, it’s Bruner. He’s getting in the elevator,” New Guy reported.

  Mindy watched on her iPhone as New Guy followed Bruner into the small elevator. The doors closed, and the two men began their ascent.

  “Don’t do anything, yet,” Stewart instructed.

  The desk clerk had told Bruner that Stewart was in Room 215. It hadn’t occurred to the desk clerk that Agent Bruner was the enemy, though it did strike him as odd that someone would ask for Stewart Faulkner by name during an undercover operation.

  “And who are you?” the desk clerk had asked, thrusting an authoritative and suspicious glare at the man.

  “Federal Agent Karl Bruner,” was the quick and even more authoritative response. That was one of the perks of the job: a title that commanded respect.

  With a swipe of her finger, Mindy changed the image on her iPhone from the elevator to the lobby. She saw the three trespassers collect at the elevator, waiting for it to return. Another swipe of the finger showed Bruner stepping onto the second floor. New Guy stayed back, holding the door open to keep the elevator from descending.

  In the downstairs utility closet, Michael-James and a nephew watched the action on their phones.

  “Which ones are aliens?” the nephew asked.

  “I think the one with the sunglasses is an alien,” Michael-James said, pointing at the screen.

  “I don’t know. I don’t think aliens wear sunglasses.”

  Stewart’s iPad showed the trespassers giving up and heading to a nearby door.

  “They’re taking the stairs,” Stewart reported. “Get to that door on the second floor and hold it shut. Don’t let them up here, yet.”

  New Guy rounded the corner and found the door marked EXIT. He gripped the knob and braced himself against the wall. Stewart focused on the back of the hotel-room door. He could feel doom approaching. Bruner would be there any second.

  “We have to get rid of him,” Stewart said.

  “What do we do?” Web whispered. Nephew looked to Grizzly. Grizzly looked to Stewart. No one seemed to have the answer. Suddenly, Mindy popped out of her seat and moved with such purpose that the whole room took note.

  She disappeared into the bathroom and closed the door.

  Was she really hiding in the bathroom? Web wondered.

  Everyone shifted to get a better look as they heard water hissing from the shower. A moment later, she emerged with a towel around her torso and tucked under her arms, leaving her clothes in a pile by the tub. She headed to the hotel-room door with her wet hair stuck to her neck, beads of water rolling down her skin and disappearing into the fluffy, white towel.

  Everyone stared at her in amazement, not from this odd behavior, but because there was a desperate need for a plan and she appeared to have one.

  Knock! Knock! Knock! Bruner’s fist was against the door. Mindy’s hand was quickly on the knob. She pulled the door slightly open and pressed her face into the crack that appeared.

  “Yes?” Her eyes locked with Bruner’s. The sight of her brought a smile to his face. The towel that hugged her ribcage and the sound of the shower in the background told him that he was interrupting.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I was looking for Stewart Faulkner.”

  Just behind the door, Stewart’s brow pinched with curiosity. Mindy played it perfectly. “He’s in the shower.” She flashed a coy smile. “Give us about an hour.”

  Bruner gave the smile right back, accompanied by the involuntary gleam of the eye one gets when a woman lets you know, in no uncertain terms, that she’s about to have sex.

  “I see,” he responded, less coolly than he would have liked. His hand rose from his pocket and flashed a business card. “Could you tell him I’ll stop back by in about . . . ninety minutes?”

  “Great.” Her moist fingers clamped on to the card. The door sealed shut, and Bruner took a slow, happy breath as he pictured her towel on the floor.

  Inside the room, there were silent cheers. Grizzly gave a thumbs-up, and nephew pumped his fist in the air. Web raised both hands in victory.

  Stewart’s mind was racing. He had a lot of data to process. What Bru
ner was doing here, how he knew Stewart’s name, and what he wanted, along with the three aliens who were making their way up the stairs . . . all of this could wait. He would have to address the most important issue first. Why had Mindy pretended—of all things—that she was taking a shower with him? The thought had come to her so quickly, as if she had been thinking it already. And she pulled it off so naturally. She wore it like an old familiar sweater. But to Stewart, the thought of it had all the itches of a brand new shirt with the tags still attached.

  His earpiece interrupted his thoughts, like a cold glass of reality to the face.

  “They’re getting close,” New Guy said.

  “Let them through,” Stewart ordered.

  New Guy released the knob and stepped back. The hall was gripped by an atmosphere akin to slow motion, as Dexim, Jin, and Tobi stepped into the hall and sauntered toward the approaching Bruner. Neither party had reason to suspect the other, but each was accustomed to being suspicious without cause. Their eyes did a generic scan of one another, just for good measure, and they exchanged polite nods as they passed. Jin made sure to conceal the tracking device against his hip.

  Bruner stopped at the elevator and looked back. Not at the aliens walking down the hall, but past them, at the door he just left. This was when Mindy’s perfect plan kicked in for the second time with lingering effectiveness. Bruner still had questions, and had she merely said Stewart was out, Bruner would have gone back to the door and knocked again, to see what information he could sift out of her. But the way Mindy left it changed everything. He couldn’t go back—not for ninety minutes. First, he would be committing the most heinous crime against social etiquette: he would be uncoupling a couple. Second, he would run a very high risk of coming off as a creep who wanted to get another look at a wet girl in a towel. No, he couldn’t return. He would just have to wait the ninety minutes. He turned and boarded the elevator. The sliding doors squeezed out his view of the three undercover aliens.