The Cure (27 page)

Hansen told her he had had second thoughts about attempting misdirection by planting false leads in her old room. Returning to this room was too risky.

“I agree,” she said. “I came to the same conclusion after you left.”

“I’ll drive by the motel a few times and do some reconnaissance. If there are hostiles in the parking lot, I’ll wait until they leave. If not, we can change our appearances and get the hell out of there.”

“Did you just use the words
reconnaissance
and
hostiles
?” said Erin in amusement.

Hansen laughed. “I thought you’d like that. I may not read your genre, but I don’t live in a cave. I have seen movies with military themes.”

“Those wouldn’t be the ones where Hasbro toys come to life, would they?”

“Nah. I’d never watch mindless stuff like that. If it doesn’t have subtitles and isn’t showing at an art house theater, I won’t go. It’s as simple as that. My favorites are arty French films with German subtitles.”

“Let me guess. You don’t speak a word of either language?”

“Good guess,” he replied with a chuckle.

Hansen knew they were wasting precious time on banter, but they were both under tremendous stress, and this was a way to defuse the tension a bit and continue to solidify the deep connection that was rapidly developing between them.

“Stay on the phone while you shop, so I can know exactly what you’re getting and make sure you get the right sizes. Knowing what you’ve bought will help me plot out the most efficient way for us to transform ourselves.”

“Sounds good.”

“I figure once you’re back, we should be able to get shorn, colored, tattooed, and clothed in less than ten minutes.”

“Roger that,” said Hansen with a heavy sigh.

30

RYAN BROCK WATCHED
as his team left the vicinity of the Saguaro Inn to pursue other leads. He and the man he had chosen to partner with on this mission, Lieutenant Jim Blessinger, would be doing the same soon. But before doing so, he wanted to be absolutely certain he had left no stone unturned. The petite woman at the front desk, who had recognized Erin Palmer’s photo on TV, had told them that Erin had checked in, using an alias, paid in cash, and was now gone, not bothering to stop by the front desk when checkout time had rolled around just minutes earlier. A maid had been about to begin cleaning Erin’s room, but they had arrived in time to stop her, so nothing inside had been disturbed.

Erin Palmer could have left half an hour before they arrived or ten hours before. There was no way to tell.

According to the desk clerk, Erin had checked in alone. The clerk had also happened to see her return to the motel by cab, within an hour or so of when she had disappeared from their sight at the union. She had been alone this time as well.

This matched their expectations. She and Kyle Hansen would have almost had to have gone their separate ways to have any chance of slipping by them. And splitting up made by far the most sense strategically. Given her almost preternatural strategic abilities in this area, Brock was convinced they would split up and make things more difficult for them.

Brock had gained considerable respect for this girl, who continued to make seasoned veterans look like rookie assholes. He suspected she was long gone. There was always the chance the clerk had misidentified her, but given this guest’s arrival by cab, without bags, and payments in cash, he was convinced it really had been Erin Palmer.

So now he and Blessinger were in the room she had checked into, trying to find tea leaves to read: tiny balled-up pieces of paper with writing on them, a book of matches; anything.

The TV station that Erin had last watched was a local one. Brock wondered if she had seen herself on the screen. If so, she would be even harder to catch, since she would be more careful than ever. But it didn’t matter. The dragnet for her was so extensive she didn’t stand a chance. This wasn’t football, where a great defense could win the day. This was a game of cat and mouse. With five thousands cats. And a single mouse. Didn’t matter how clever a mouse, it was only a matter of time—and not much time at that.

Brock inspected the room with a fine-tooth comb but found nothing useful. It was time to go. Somehow they would catch her trail again. He took one last look around. Everything was neat and tidy, for the most part. A few towels had been used. And the sheets looked as though a war had been fought on them. But Brock didn’t doubt Erin Palmer had done a lot of tossing and turning before she had managed to fall asleep.

The outline of a small stain caught his eye on the cotton sheet, like a small bit of soda had been spilled and had left a faint, amorphous outline when it had dried. He tilted his head. It could have been a permanent feature of the sheet, but he doubted it.

Would water have left this kind of outline? Maybe. He hadn’t seen any spent soda bottles or other drinks. Had she tried to disguise herself? He knew nothing about dying hair, but perhaps she had spilled a clear ingredient in this process—maybe a base before the new color was applied. He had already turned over the sheets and the yellow-and-orange floral bedspread once to be sure nothing had been left in their folds, but he did so again, even more carefully this time. He found no other evidence that would suggest hair dye had been applied here.

He leaned over the bed and put his nose close to the faint outline on the bed. His eyes widened. What an idiot he had been. How could he be so fucking stupid?

“Jim, smell this and tell me what you think it is.”

Blessinger repeated Brock’s maneuver and wrinkled his nose in disgust. “Jesus, Ryan. Really?”

“I’ll take that as a confirmation. It seems our little grad student got laid last night.”

“Yeah. No shit. But I would have taken your fucking word for it,” said Blessinger, looking toward the sink as though he wanted to scrub his nose with soap.

Brock ignored him. They had been careless. Just because the desk clerk had said Erin had checked in alone, didn’t mean she couldn’t have met up with Hansen later. Brock should have checked, just to be sure. Erin Palmer and Kyle Hansen had obviously joined up again here—in more ways than one. Very interesting.

“I’ll let the team know we think they’re traveling together,” said Blessinger. “And have become … good friends.”

“Do that,” said Brock. No matter what, they had uncovered useful information, but maybe he could get lucky. “While you’re calling the team, I’m going to talk to the desk clerk one more time. What was her name?”

“Whitney. You know, like the inventor of the cotton gin.”

“Really? That’s how you remember it?”

“It worked, didn’t it?”

Brock rolled his eyes. Minutes later he was sliding a tablet computer into the hands of the woman named Whitney at the front desk. “Have you ever seen this man?”

She studied the photo with a funny look on her face. “Yeah. He just checked in a little while ago.”

Brock thought he would jump out of his skin. “He checked in? Here? Are you sure?”

“Positive.”

“No kidding,” he said, forcing himself to sound relaxed and barely interested. “What room did you put him in?”

She checked a computer. “Room one forty-eight.”

“Was he alone?”

“Yes. I think he might have walked here—I don’t know from where. Then, after he checked in, he came back and gave me a whole routine about losing his phone, and needing to check a few urgent e-mails. He practically begged me to let him use a computer for five minutes.”

“Interesting,” said Brock, trying to hide his eagerness. “I assume you let him.”

“Yes.”

“The computer he used,” said Brock. “Has anyone used it since he did?”

Whitney shook her head.

“Can I see it?” asked Brock.

Whitney led him through the desk area into a small office. Brock worked the mouse and within seconds had the recent browsing history for the computer up on the screen. He smiled as he clicked on the last page Hansen had viewed. It showed a used car for sale, a blue Chevy Malibu long past its prime. It was quite an eyesore. But to Brock it was the most beautiful sight he had seen in quite some time.

He left the small office. “Thanks, Whitney, you’ve been very helpful,” he said as he passed the front desk. He paused at the glass double doors serving the motel lobby. “And I’ll make sure you get the fifty-thousand-dollar reward. For now, though, do me a favor. Don’t leave this office until I give you the green light. Hopefully, it won’t be too long. And light up the No Vacancy sign.”

Whitney swallowed hard. “Will I be in any danger?” she asked.

“Stay put and you’ll be just fine,” he said reassuringly. “I promise.”

And with that he pushed through the lobby doors and began dialing his cell phone.

31

HANSEN PURCHASED THE
items in his cart and returned to the Blue Medusa in the Walmart parking lot. As he entered the car, he wondered what Drake was doing right now. A being he had worked with far more closely than any human.

While Drake had helped him achieve unbelievable things, Hansen had also often been relegated to the position of a lowly hired hand. But this couldn’t be helped. Someone needed to take care of mundane interactions with humans, since it was always best to keep Drake’s interactions with members of the host planet to a minimum.

Besides, if it weren’t for him being Drake’s errand boy, he never would have had the chance to meet Erin Palmer.

But Hansen had been worried about his alien associate for some time now, even prior to this attack, which elevated his anxiety to the stratosphere. Drake had seemed to be getting more and more unstable as the psychological burden of living among the constant savagery of humanity took its toll. And now this. Not only having to witness, and escape, a brutal attack, but being forced to go on the run. Being hunted like an animal.

And the attack in Yuma wasn’t the first time Drake had experienced such savagery up close and personal. As Hansen pulled out of the parking lot, vivid memories of Drake’s first exposure to human ruthlessness came to the forefront of his consciousness.

*   *   *

TWO YEARS HAD
gone by since Hansen had met with Fuller and Fermi. Two years in which he had worked harder than ever before, and during which progress was slower, and more painful, than ever before.

The Wraps had been right to intervene when they had. If he didn’t know for sure that he was on the right track, he would have given up months earlier, as stubborn as he was. This was sheer torture, made even worse by knowing that beings existed somewhere close by who could give him the answers he needed instantly.

Generous funding had magically appeared, as promised, to support Hansen and to purchase expensive equipment for his advisor’s lab. Even so, his advisor was embarrassed by Hansen. He appreciated the funding, although he was convinced a crackpot who knew nothing about physics was responsible, but insisted that Hansen would never earn his Ph.D. unless he switched gears immediately. Unless he got with the program and worked on something that wasn’t unanimously thought to be preposterous.

Hansen had finally broken up with Morgan, and while he did date on occasion, he hadn’t found anyone special. He still lived in an apartment, and he was soaking up as much knowledge as he could from some truly brilliant professors, skeptical of his own work though they might be.

Steve Fuller hadn’t attempted to communicate with him even once since that first meeting, but Hansen felt certain he was being observed, at least periodically. But he couldn’t bring himself to feel outraged. They’d be fools to trust him entirely.

Not that he wasn’t trustworthy, but too much was riding on him keeping quiet. He could only imagine how often the Wraps and their computer were helping to break up terrorist plots around the world, carefully tracking WMD in the hands of crazed regimes, and using inconceivable computing power to predict pockets of global tension and suggest ways to defuse them before they spiraled out of control.

The Wraps were like benevolent fairy godmothers watching over humanity, guiding them away from the self-destruction an even greater computer on Suran had predicted with such certainty. Given the importance of Fuller’s operation, and the lives it was saving in both the short and the long run, Hansen would have kept tabs on someone like himself if he were in their shoes, making sure he didn’t betray them.

When he had started to pry, Fuller could have just put a bullet in his head. So the fact that his head still only had the usual five openings, and not a bullet-shaped sixth between his eyes, made the prospect of being under surveillance a lot easier to bear.

And instead of eliminating him as a risk, Fuller and Fermi had vindicated his beliefs and given him a purpose. He would be instrumental in making epic breakthroughs in quantum physics for mankind. Yes, he was just repeating what members of the Seventeen had discovered hundreds of thousands of years earlier, and other races, perhaps, millions or billions of years before that. But it was like watching a stunning magic trick performed by a master illusionist and being the first to figure out how it was done. There was still some satisfaction to be had from this endeavor.

And by pushing the boundaries of current knowledge, he was hastening the day when humanity would reach a stage of maturity and scientific development that would allow them to be welcomed as the eighteenth member of galactic society.

Hansen was in his apartment one morning, staring off into space and hoping that some divine intervention would give him insight into a problem that had stumped him for weeks, when there was a single light rap on his door.

He threw it open, expecting to see a solicitor. Instead, the first thing he saw was a yellow spiral notebook, being held open and thrust toward his face. DON’T SAY A WORD was written in big capital letters on the page facing him.

Hansen’s breath was knocked out of him just as surely as if he had been hit in the stomach. The notebook was being held up by twelve thin, supple tentacles, protruding from the midsection of the man standing there.