Trespassers: a science-fiction novel (4 page)

New Guy released his finger from the trigger, as Bruner reached the top of the ridge. Bruner stared into the open meadow below. It was the worst sight he could have imagined: the field was calm and peaceful. A bitter disappointment settled over him .
.
. the kind that can
’
t simply be shrugged off after a few moments of pouting. Bruner saw the uprooted tree. He saw the girl sitting alone on the red-and-white blanket with black lines crisscrossing its surface. But they didn
’
t trigger any suspicions. Mindy saw Bruner as well, and she did her impression of nonchalance, but her act made no difference. First, she was too far away. Second, he was not inclined to suspect anyone of covering up an alien encounter. Bruner never considered the possibility of a secret agency working against him. Why would the government pay one agency to seek out alien activity while paying another to cover it up? Of all the questions that swirled through Bruner
’
s mind over the course of his life, this one never had.

Bruner
’
s hip squawked,
“
We got nothing.
”

Bruner lifted the radio to his mouth, without breaking his trance on the field below.
“
I got nothing here, too,
”
he reported, unable to conceal the regret in his voice. A sudden urge to redeem something for his efforts burst forth, and he channeled it into the radio.
“
Question everyone in the park.
”

The voice of reason answered back,
“
We don
’
t have as many people as we used to, you know?
”

Bruner squinted and swallowed this harsh truth.
“
Question as many as you can.
”
An old familiar compulsion was pulling at him
—
a steady, throbbing impulse to drink .
.
. from the bottle stashed under the seat in his car .
.
. from the limitless stock that filled the shelves of the nearest bar.

Karl Bruner & the Alien Research Agency

The Alien Research Agency was a group of government agents, led by Karl Bruner, which was dedicated to proving the existence of alien life-forms. Today, the tiny agency was a shell of what it used to be. A few years back
—
actually five years back
—
alien research was at its peak, and Bruner
’
s agency was the prime beneficiary. Government research dollars poured in, swelling the group to a total of 168 members, with 52 agents and 116 operatives, which included professionals from all walks of life, from dentists, to botanists, to auto mechanics. It wasn
’
t the collection one might expect for an agency tasked with finding extra-terrestrial life on Earth. However, to Bruner, it made perfect sense.

Bruner had always taken a realistic approach to the search for alien visitors. You wouldn
’
t find any psychics, ghost hunters, or palm readers in his agency. To Bruner, all that was nonsense.
If there are aliens out there to be found
, he often huffed,
we
’
re going to use the same techniques to find them that we use to find anything else
. Bruner implemented this plan with the precision of a wartime general. Bruner, however, was not military. He didn
’
t believe in the military approach. Personal freedoms and individuality were high priorities for him. In his mind, one individual was more capable and competent than a hundred cookie-cutter recruits, no matter how specially trained they were.

When Bruner assembled a team, he saw two kinds of people: those with spacey eyes and blank expressions; and those with a certain focus and curiosity about them. To him, the first kind
—
the spacey ones
—
were only cut out to be clock-punching, nine-to-five zombies who swing from cigarette break, to coffee break, to quitting time.

The second kind
—
the focused, curious type
—
was quite a different story. One glimpse from them could make an instant connection. No r
é
sum
é
on Earth could equal the weight Bruner gave to that gleam in the eye, that gleam that only appeared in an eye that was looking back at you, as opposed to an eye that was busy wondering what time it got off work or how early one could leave on Friday afternoon without getting fired.

Anyway, Bruner believed alien visitors were real, so he endeavored to find them through real means, and he designed his team for that purpose. Whether a person believed in the existence of aliens was of no consequence to Bruner .
.
. at least, not when he was assembling a team. In its heyday, the team covered every base. Detectives combed the landscape for evidence, just as they would during a routine homicide investigation. Psychiatrists evaluated the demeanor and mental state of eyewitnesses. Physicians examined those who claimed to have been abducted. Electricians checked the power lines and grids at locations where blackouts were reported.

Recruiting the bounty hunters was a hard sell at first, but Bruner laid out a convincing case. He explained to the bounty hunters, quite logically, that they often had little to go on when tracking a bail jumper, and most of the time it was either the testimony of people who came into contact with the subject or the predicted habits of the subject that led to a capture. In the search for an alien life-form on Earth, these same two factors existed.

If this logic didn
’
t sway a prospective bounty hunter, Bruner could always get their attention by sweetening the pitch (i.e., revealing the government-allocated pay rate). The day rate was $125, plus health insurance, life insurance, and dental. That usually didn
’
t muster even as much as a raised eyebrow. However, Bruner wasn
’
t done. Far from it. Thanks to the bureaucrats of the US government, agency payrolls were never what they appeared. Each agent of Bruner
’
s team received hazard pay for each day in the field. This doubled the rate to $250 per day, since
every
day was considered
in the field
. Yet, there was still more. For every day outside Washington, DC, operatives received time and a half, on top of the hazard pay. This brought the $250 to $375. This, however, was just the beginning. Any professional operative who served in a part-time capacity was entitled to receive compensation for any work that would be missed as a result of serving.

At this point in the sales pitch, Bruner certainly had the full attention of the potential operative, and the beginnings of a dry smile usually formed on his face as he explained that the government had chosen not to burden the operatives with calculating how much potential income would be lost. The government just assumed that, since it was willing to pay $375, anyone else would be willing to pay the same. So, the $375 was doubled to $750. That was typically enough to satisfy the average bounty hunter, but they were required to take even more: $95 per day for meals and $90 per day for travel expenses. The travel pay was doubled for any day outside Washington, DC. That
’
s $935. With this pay package, Bruner could coax almost anyone he wanted onto the team.

When Bruner targeted a town, quiet waves of specialists would roll in, analyzing everything. Streams of data would begin to pour into the makeshift operations center, which was usually located in hotel rooms or a rented building.

If there was a single clue out there in the small towns of America, Bruner was going to find it. He took every call and followed every lead. The idea was to pinpoint anomalies and identify trends. To him, it was just as important to debunk the false reports as it was to follow the more genuine leads.

In his six years in the field, Bruner had investigated over five hundred sites, but all he had to show for his efforts was an artifact that he wore around his neck. He told people it was an arrowhead, but he knew it was something very different. It was made of two metals that had been twisted together. He had performed dozens of tests on the pendant, but he could not match it to any known material on Earth.

Bruner had trouble admitting it
—
even to himself
—
but that pendant was very special to him. He found it at an investigation site, at the base of a thick tree. It captivated him. He spent a moment on his knee, gazing at it, while other researchers scoured the field. For some reason, he felt an overwhelming impulse to conceal this piece from the others. Sensing prying eyes, he slid the artifact into his pocket. Since its discovery, it was never out of his grasp. It took several days before he actually attached a cord to it and put it around his neck.

Normally, each item that Bruner uncovered found its way into the twenty-by-thirty storage room across from his office. And from time to time, usually when he
’
s feeling down
—
or more commonly these days, when he
’
s feeling down
and
had a few too many
—
he would sift nostalgically through its shelves. That pendant, however, never joined the other artifacts. It was something that he just wasn
’
t going to part with.

For all his precision and planning, Bruner couldn
’
t take credit for building the team up to its former robust size. Bruner
’
s agency owed its success to another man: Harold Stanton. Harold was long gone from the picture now, but he did for Bruner
’
s agency what he had done for many agencies. He wrangled the funding. Directing the flow of funds that poured out of Washington, DC, was a vocation all to itself. It involved the same old song and dance that had been practiced in every town in the world since shortly after the beginning of time. This should not be confused with the actual noble and forthright rules of the nation, as are found in the US Constitution, nor should it be confused with the honorable principles of the country, as are found in the Declaration of Independence. No, this was something altogether different. It was the professional manipulation of those rules and principles.

One of the foremost masters of this was the aforementioned Harold Stanton. He was a purist. He wasn
’
t using his position as a stepping-stone. He shifted the flow of money in Washington because he loved it. The excitement and nonstop action of inside politics was necessary for his mind and body. He shaped beltway politics and made an indelible mark on the granite pillars of Washington. He was directly responsible for allocating the bulk of spending for the United States of America, and he never once appeared on television or in a newspaper
—
a testament to how he executed his job.

Before Harold Stanton made his quiet exit from the grand arena, he incorporated Bruner
’
s pet project into his song-and-dance routine, diverting every penny Bruner dreamed of through an incomprehensible maze of paperwork that could only be kept straight in the mind of someone like Harold Stanton .
.
. and, truth be told, there was no one else like Harold Stanton.

Bruner first met Stanton at a Washington bar, not the kind where a person goes to get drunk or throw a line in the water hoping to snag a shag for the evening. It was the kind of bar where one goes to get government funding for a project, because in the nation
’
s capital, you need a friend on the inside, and that
’
s exactly where Stanton was. Bruner, however, was not there to get any funding for anything. He wandered into the bar for the wrong reason: to get drunk and throw a line in the water, hoping to snag a shag for the evening. He was struggling with three life-altering events. These events should have been separated by a decade or two, just to allow the appropriate recovery time. Instead, they all hit him at once.

Those three life-altering events were the following: His wife was on the verge of leaving him. He was teetering on the brink of losing his job. And he was one clumsy step away from bankruptcy. He was in the Bermuda Triangle of life.

In his stupor, he formulated what seemed like a perfect plan. He would take a few deep breaths, stagger to the nearest bar, and proceed to drink his problems away. Phase two of this plan involved removing his wedding ring and letting be what would be .
.
. a sort of casual-sex Russian roulette. His wife had two feet out the door, and he couldn
’
t bear another second of standing on the porch, calling her back. He would have enough dignity to let fate decide.

Bruner
’
s meeting with Stanton was purely chance. Had he sat down on a different bar stool that evening, he very probably would have awoken on the floor, next to a hungover, twenty-something Washington intern, surrounded by discarded undergarments. Instead, he awoke with full funding for a project that had been, to that point, simply a good idea that he poked at people from time to time. This time, it turns out, he poked it at the right person. Stanton fell for the idea. It was probably just the challenge of it, but he listened to Bruner
’
s ranting about the way things should be done, and he turned the concept into a whole new agency, headed by Bruner.