Alien Hunter (Flynn Carroll) (24 page)

“So come on,” Giorgio wheedled. “I can do it through your clothes, it’s nice. Daddy no see.”

“Yeah, but daddy touch.”

“No, no, no boobies, baby. Just let daddy do his thing.”

She yelled, “You’re too icky, okay! It’d be like being touched by the Pillsbury Dough Boy, get it? You need to meet my dad. He’d love you.”

“He’s a stinkin’ Republican. I don’t massage no stinkin’ Republican.”

“You could bite off his dick. You’ll get the chance.”

Mac sat in the window of the bedroom they’d made into an office.

Flynn said to him, “That’s going well.”

“If she bolts, Giorgio has orders to tie her up and stick her in a closet.”

“Don’t tell me these things, damnit!”

Mac’s window overlooked the Colorado River and a sunny view of South Austin beyond. “I got a bad feeling,” he said. “I had a good feeling. Now I got a bad one.”

“It’s gonna be a piece of cake.”

“No, Flynn, it isn’t.”

Mac had good instincts, there was no question about that. Excellent. Flynn had not told him of the casualties so far, and he wondered why not. He should warn the guy, obviously. And yet he didn’t.

He liked Mac, who was, as he claimed, an affable man. But he was also an extraordinary engine of human suffering. That’s what crime is—the infliction of human suffering for financial or other gain. God only knew how many lives Mac’s scams ruined in a week, not to mention his more murderous activities. Of course the DEA and the Rangers let the shooting of drug mules and cartel gunmen happen. Scumbags killing scumbags, nice and convenient.

“I’ve got the whole area mapped out,” Diana said, “from the Animal Rescue to Jay Elder’s ranch compound near Lake Travis. There’s a house, a barn, a couple of outbuildings, a dog run and kennel. Active.”

“What took you so long?” Mac asked. “You coulda gotten that off Google Earth an hour ago. We need to get out there, get a feel for the land.”

“Mapped to three feet, in real time,” she continued. “Google Earth doesn’t do that.”

“You guys can recognize faces from space, can’t you? Read license plates?”

“Very yesterday, but yes.”

“What can you do now? Read minds?”

“Classified.”

“Cool word, son. Must make you feel important as hell.”

It was already pushing seven, and the sun was starting to set.

“There’s something strange,” Diana said abruptly.

On the screen of the laptop she was using was a wilderness area. Right in the middle of it was what appeared to be a small village, made of logs and expertly camouflaged.

“It’s in the middle of a wildlife preserve. Strange place for a village.”

“Any signs of life?”

“I can’t be sure. There are paths, obviously.”

“What the hell does this have to do with the price of bread?” Mac asked.

Diana said, “It’s two miles from Jay Elder’s ranch house. And look at the buildings—there’s been an effort to camouflage them. Quite skillful. You wouldn’t see this for what it was on a Google satellite map. And as for Google Earth, their trucks stick to roads.”

Mac peered at it. “Boy, I can even see individual branches in that camouflage. From way up there.”

“Mac, we can determine your rate of hair loss by watching your bald spot. Face it, if you weren’t useful, the feds would’ve crushed you like a bug a long time ago.”

“You’d be surprised at how good I am.”

“They’re better. Now, let me see. I can switch to another lens—here we go.”

The image changed to infrared. Nobody had to ask about the change. Both Flynn and Mac knew infrared very well.

“Hm,” Diana said. “No obvious heat signatures. Flock of deer, eleven does and a buck, about half a mile away. That glowing dot is probably a buzzard looking for supper. Nothing dead, though, not big enough to spot, anyway.”

“Corpses are cold,” Mac said.

“Rot is hot, son. This system is sensitive enough to pick up the heat of decay.”

Flynn said, “Maybe it’s an old hippie place. Commune. Austin was a major stop on the Hippie Highway.”

“Old paths would be more vague. These are sharply drawn. People use this, but I don’t think they’re there now. And they don’t have pets. No sign of any dogs or cats.”

“You wouldn’t happen to be able to spot a tiger with that thing, would you?” Mac asked.

“I would but I haven’t.”

“Shit, then, what am I supposed to hunt?”

“You don’t understand,” Flynn said. “The tiger isn’t where it’s supposed to be, penned at the Animal Rescue League. It’s the only Siberian tiger presently missing in the United States. It’s called Snow Mountain, it’s seven years old and it has had a number of legitimate exhibitor owners, specifically two zoos and a circus. Apparently it was sold along because it ate a hell of a lot. It’s about forty percent larger than what’s normal for the breed. It was collected by the Texas Fish and Wildlife from an abusive situation, so the record says. Of course, records lie.”

“And it’s here in Texas—specifically near Lake Travis? Or not?”

Diana said, “Jay Elders is here because he was at his law firm yesterday. But he’s just back, interestingly enough, from Vegas.”

“How do you find things like that out?”

“Classified, son.”

“Quit that, okay? I’m sorry I insulted you. Son.”

“You are sorry, son, I agree there. Now, take a look at the Elders place. Tell me what you think.” She shifted to another image, this one of a ranch house in a small compound of buildings. There were three trucks parked near the house, two of them Cadillac Escalades, and the third a van with blackened windows. The van’s side door was open, and it was possible—just—to see a bit of the interior.

“There aren’t any rear seats,” Flynn said.

“Nope, and look closely.” She blew the image up to a blur. “Isn’t that a barrier behind the front seats, like the kind you see in taxis? See that white there, across the top—you can just see the dashboard beyond it, so that’s clear. But below, it’s a featureless blackness. If you were transporting a large animal, you might use a van like that, especially if it had a touchy disposition.”

“He’s touchy all right,” Flynn said. But then he remembered the expression on the cat’s face in the storm drain, almost—was it kindness? A sort of kindness? “Touchy and complicated.”

“I have two images here. The van pulled up. Then this one, the van with the rear door opened. About seventy seconds between them. I’m hoping we can find some residual heat in the second image.”

Mac said, “Do the DEA boys have access to stuff like this?”

“Classified.”

“I think I might retire,” Mac said.

“Don’t do that, Mac,” Flynn said, “you’ll kill my dream.”

“Which is?”

“Collar of a lifetime.”

“Fuck you, Flynn.”

“Double back.”

They both chuckled, remembering their young days in the streets of Menard, getting up to no good together. “Fuck you” and “double back” was essential dialogue of their youth.

When they were ten, they’d been like three brothers, him and Mac and Eddie.

“Too long, Buddy,” he said.

From the living room came a peal of female laughter. “She’s discovered that Giorgio’s a eunuch,” Mac commented.

“Oh, come on,” Diana said. “There are no eunuchs.”

“He was cut by a sultan so he could be trusted to massage the ladies of the hareem.”

“Holy shit, who would consent to that?”

“I don’t think that ‘no’ was an available answer. He made some money, though.” Cissy laughed again, wonder in her voice. “When he can’t get what he wants, which is to touch their beautiful bodies, he does show and tell. Works the pity angle. She’ll be on his table shortly.”

“Guys, this has processed up nicely.”

Flynn saw the same image on the screen, except this time there were a few extra blurs. “What are we looking at here?”

She pointed to a ghostly smear. “That’s a man. The computer’s telling me he’s six two and fairly heavy. Likely a real bruiser. Now, here’s the interesting one. Right there by the open door. The computer doesn’t know what that is, but it’s definitely a valid infrared signature. A minute or so before this photo was taken, something warm moved through that space.”

“They just let a damn tiger out to roam the effing night?” Mac asked.

“Looks like it,” Diana said.

“It can’t be smart enough to risk that. What if it eats a kid?”

“It’ll go out and take a deer, be my guess. Stay out of sight, come home at dawn.”

“Damn hard to credit.”

“Mac, this hunt is gonna be the challenge of your life.”

Mac smiled, just a little, deep in his face. “You know, I think I’m gonna take my nice warm girl into the master and get myself prepped.”

“Don’t drink anything more. Don’t get fatigued.”

“First off, I’ve only had three bottles of that flat-assed Dom Perignon they sent up. Plus sex before a hunt helps my concentration.” He went off into the living room. “Girl! Get offa that thing, you’re gonna get your ass laid right now.” A moment’s silence, then, “Come on, little man, you can quarterback.”

Chrissy, Mac, and Giorgio went into the bedroom, and soon what they used to call “sounds of revelry” in Flynn’s frat house at UT were heard. He wished he had Mac’s courage to still live as a boy, but he could never be as careless with lives—his own and others—as Mac was.

“Would you please go close that door?” Diana asked him.

Fine by him. Envying Mac’s kind of freedom wasn’t healthy.

“I’ve picked up a couple more traces,” Diana said when he came back. “Here—” She pointed to what looked to Flynn like a slight white discoloration in the image. “And again.” The next discoloration was even fainter. “It was moving south-southeast.” She looked up from her work. “Flynn, I think the damn thing is on patrol around that house.”

“Ideal for Mac. If it’s following a set pattern, he’ll figure that out. The man could track a ghost in a snowstorm.”

“That’s going to work both ways.”

“There’ll be two of us, and neither one’s going to do what Snow Mountain expects, which is to assume he’s dumb.” He paused. “Diana, do you know anything about combining human and animal genes? Would that be the reason the damn thing is so smart?”

“You have to assume so. Or maybe it’s a mix of ours, tiger, and who knows what? Think about it. If they could be from anywhere, they could
bring
anything.”

“I’m wanting to give Mac some idea of what to expect. He understands that this is a real smart tiger, but how smart he doesn’t understand.”

“If he gets eaten, I have to tell you, I don’t personally have a problem with that. But that’s just me, of course.”

“Friend of my youth. Plus, I see a future for him on our new team.”

“How could he possibly survive a security check?”

Flynn said nothing.

The sun was well down now, the lights of the city glowing, the river a black ribbon. Flynn could even see a few stars, but that wouldn’t last. The moon was rising in the east, full and fat, a big Texas moon.

He began methodically assembling his equipment, his own personal night-vision lenses, his new pistol—one of Mac’s .357 Magnums—and his other essentials, a handheld GPS, a backup compass.

She slid his MindRay into the backpack.

“No.”

“You were using it under pressure in adverse field conditions.”

“All field conditions are adverse.”

“We can’t leave this thing in a hotel room.”

That stopped him. Surely she didn’t expect to come with them. “Diana—”

“I know what you’re about to say, and don’t even think about it. You absolutely need me in the area.”

“No.”

“I can operate a command post in the car. I’ll be looking at satellite data as you work.”

“Do it from here. We both have cell phones.”

“It’s too much of a risk and you know it. You’ll be lucky to have an hour before they detect you. Maybe less. If cell phone calls are popping out there, way less.”

He couldn’t deny the truth of that, nor the fact that the information she could provide would be extremely valuable, even essential.

“We can use the same radios we used in Montana. I’ve got yours, mine, and Mike’s in my backpack. They are low power and the encryption technology makes them sound like backscatter. No scanner in the world will even identify our transmissions as signals.”

“In this world. Maybe we failed in Montana because alien technology was in use against us.”

She was silent for a moment. Then she said, “The value outweighs the risks. If you get detected, I’m going to see them coming. And what if I nail down the location of the tiger? That could happen.”

He looked at her. She glared back at him, the determination and defiance if anything increasing her attraction.

“Good enough,” he said, “let’s get studley back in his pants and do some hunting.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

As Flynn and Mac headed off into the thick brush, Flynn looked back at the truck. They’d parked it off the road near a little place called Balcones Springs, where they’d pulled the truck up into a brushy area along a disused road, but one that was high enough to provide the low-power radios a useful platform. Nearby was the Balcones Canyonlands National Wildlife Preserve, as difficult an area to walk as the Texas Hill Country offered. It consisted of nearly forty square miles of steep-sided hills, gnarly ravines, cactus, and cedar. The only nearby water of any significance was in Lake Travis itself.

They were still two miles both from the strange little village and Jay Elder’s ranch house, and about equidistant between them.

Flynn touched the “transmit” button on his radio’s earpiece. A moment later, there was a brief burst of static, then another. Mac and Diana, acknowledging.

“That satellite stuff has me spooked. How does she gain access?”

“Dunno. It’s not a password, that I do know. Something more esoteric.”

“What if this guy Elders has access to the same feed?”

“He doesn’t.”

“You know that?”

“If he did, why would he be doing something as risky as using guard animals—the tiger, for example. Or the dogs.”

“I get your drift. It’s just that my bad feeling is getting worse, man.” He looked down at his GPS. “The last place she picked up the tiger was eighteen hundred yards due north.” He put the GPS in his pocket.