Xan, Part One

Brent O’Connor didn’t answer his buzzer at the front door. I waited for a few minutes, trying not to look like a Jehovah’s Witness, and eventually I sneaked into the building behind a guy delivering groceries.

I knocked at apartment 3B, from the buzzer downstairs. No answer.

            A TV private eye would have picked the lock in 30 seconds. Me? I don’t know how to pick a lock. So I went down to the basement parking garage to see if O’Connor’s car was there.

            Fortunately the garage was laid out according to apartment number. I found a blue Subaru that needed a wash. It wasn’t likely to get one soon, though.

            O’Connor was in the front seat. Dead.

            I backed away, glad I hadn’t put my hands anywhere on the car. After I got my breath back and made sure I wasn’t going to throw up, I took out my phone to call my client.

            “I found Brent,” I told her.

            “What did he say?” She sounded impatient.

            “He’s, uh—dead.”

            A pause. “What the hell?”

Rikki Silvano had hired me that morning to look for her husband, Jamie.

            “He sometimes leaves for a few days, but he always calls me, and it’s never been this long.” She had stringy blond hair and a short nose. Her eyes were red with worry.

            “What does he do?”

            “He’s a tech consultant. Freelance. But what he really does is . . . hunt UFOs.”

            The X-Files theme hummed through my head. “How long has he been missing?”

            “A week. I called the police and filed a report, but they haven’t done anything.” She gulped from a bottle of water.

            “I’d need a list of friends, business contacts . . .” I assumed she’d already called them, but it was the first thing to do when looking for a missing person. You don’t look for the person, you look for someone the person called.

            “He was supposed to meet with Brent O’Connor. He works for a company called Hawke Electronics. With an ‘E’ on ‘Hawke.’ I called them, but they keep telling me he’s off. I’ve got the phone number here somewhere . . .” She scrolled through her phone. “That was a week ago. That was the last I heard from Jamie.”

            I took the number. “When you say he hunts UFOs . . .”

            “He’s obsessed with them. Ever since I met him. We’ve been married four years. But he’s not a nut!” She gulped some more water. “They’re out there, or up there, or whatever, and people know about it. He’s got the evidence.” She pointed to a laptop on a desk in the corner of the living room. “I called you because I heard you, you know, take on cases like this.”

            Yeah. I get a lot or clients that way. I keep my cases confidential, but somehow people know that I talk to vampires, zombies, and demons. I’ve even actually handled a case of alien abduction.

And been abducted myself. Once.

“All right.” I looked at the laptop. “I’ll need to look at that.”

            “Take it.” She waved a hand. “I’ll give you the password. Just find him.”

            “I’ll do my best.” It was all I could promise.

            We discussed the details, and she wrote me a check.

“I’m going to have to call the police.” I called Rikki Silvano from the garage. I was staring at O’Connor’s car. “And explain what this is all about.”

            “Right. But—have you found anything else?” Her voice shook. “From the laptop?”

            I’d looked it over. It was how I’d found O’Connor’s address. “I’m still examining it.” Actually, Rachel was—my upstairs neighbor, my girlfriend, my partner when I need tech help or psychic assistance.

            “All right.” She took a deep breath to calm herself. “Call me if—when you find out anything.”

            “I will.” Then I called the police.

The first two cops opened up the car with a metal rod, standing back as O’Connor body sagged toward the concrete. He wore a black leather jacket and a T-shirt covered with dried blood.

            A CPD detective showed up a few minutes later, along with the crime scene techs. “Hendricks. You’re Jurgen?”

            “That’s me.” I’d never met him before, despite having worked with other detectives over the years. Vampires and things like that.

            “What are you doing here?” He glanced at the techs as the garage attendant stood back, nervous.

            Sam Spade could have told Hendricks to go to hell, but I couldn’t. I told him the whole story. He called into headquarters to confirm the missing persons report on Silvano. Then he said, “We’re going to need that laptop.”

            I nodded. Good thing I’d told Rachel to pull everything off of it as soon as possible. I figured I didn’t have to mention that to Hendricks if he didn’t ask directly. “How long has he been dead?”

            Hendricks seemed friendly enough. Although that could have been a good-cop act. “Based on the dried blood—and the smell . . .” The air near the car reeked. “A couple of days, at least. Are you going on with this?”

            “Unless my client fires me. Is that a problem?”

            He handed me a card. “Not as long as you talk to us.”

            I reached into a pocket. “Here’s my—”

            Hendricks laughed. “Don’t bother. I know who you are.”

            Yeah. It’s nice to be popular, I guess.

Rachel was cooking dinner in my kitchen when I got home “A very nice police officer came by and took that laptop. He left a receipt. Okay, I flirted with him a little.”

            I kissed her cheek and pulled a Coke from the refrigerator. “Thanks. Something smells good.”

            “Ratatouille.” Rachel’s got red hair and hazelnut eyes. “Eggplant, zucchini, squash . . . It’s an old family recipe. Someone’s family, anyway.” She stirred the pot. “I got everything off that laptop this morning”

“What’d you find out?”

            She tasted. “Mmm. Lots of UFO stuff. I didn’t have time to check it all out, but it’s there on the flash drive. Big file on Hawke, with profiles on all their top execs. Tons of articles on their products. Their main thing is some kind of advanced AI. A small profile page for your guy, Brent O’Connor? He’s an IT guy, degree from U of I, down in Urbana. Didn’t you almost get killed driving down there once?”

            “Yeah.” I sank down into a chair. “Can I help?”

            “It’s almost done.” She set the spoon down on a plate. “Was it bad?”

            Rachel has been through a lot of tough scenes with me. Dead bodies, sea monsters, crazed dogs, and more. “Not the worst. But I don’t know what’s coming next.”

            She pulled out some bowls. “Eat. We’ll figure it out tomorrow.”

           

The next morning, I drank some coffee, ate my cereal, checked my email, and then started pulling up the data from Silvano’s laptop.

            Rachel was right. He had tons of files on UFO research. Reports and photos and videos and more. Most of the video and images were from other people, some pulled off the web, some sent to him by contacts. A few were his own.

            One was on a highway in the Arizona desert. It looked like Silvano had been following a glowing cigar shape that soared in a straight line for several miles until it abruptly reared up and then shot into the cloudless blue sky. A voice recited the location, date, and time. The video was two years old.

            Another video was taken at night. The first few seconds were blurry, as if Silvano—or whoever—was running, but the things straightened out and I saw a spinning disc hovering over a forest clearing. It held still for ten seconds, then rose up and disappeared in the dark clouds. Again, Silvano gave details: Michigan, 9:22 p.m., six months ago.

            Okay. Silvano was serious. He kept a clip file of articles about him. He’d been interviewed dozens of times, and not just on fringe media. He was quoted in The New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, and the Huffington Post. And, okay, the Fortean Times website.

            Whether any of this this had anything to do with his disappearance—or the murder of Brent O’Connor—was another story. Had he been kidnapped by aliens? Why was Brent O’Connor dead? Would aliens use a handgun instead of just obliterating him with a plasma ray?

            Before diving deep into the data, though, I had to check something.

Like I said, a few years ago I’d actually been abducted by aliens myself. I don’t remember much about them. But I needed to know if these were the same aliens.

            I found the file. Melissa Ames and her daughter Lynne had both been taken, and then later I’d learned that Ames’ ex-husband, Craig Winters, had been part of a project using children—including Lynne—to communicate with the aliens.

            So I called Melissa Ames first. “Hi, it’s Tom Jurgen. Remember me?”

            “Of course!” She sounded like we were old friends. “How are you? What’s the—” Then her voice dropped. “Oh, no. What’s happening?”

            “Nothing.” I tried to sound sincere and reassuring. “I just need to talk with your ex-husband. It’s a different case, nothing to do with Lynne.” I hoped. “Is she okay, by the way?”

            “Oh, she’s great. Freshman year in high school. She’s totally boy crazy.” A sigh. “And nothing since. I don’t even know if she really remembers anything.”

            That was good. I still had the occasional dream about the aliens’ ship, their strange shape, their attempts to communicate. I hoped Lynne didn’t. “Like I said, it doesn’t involve your daughter.”

            She gave me the number. I thanked her, and then called Winters.

            He remembered me too. But not as an old friend. “What is this? I did everything you said. The project’s shut down. I only see my daughter once a month. I’ve got a new job. We lost the greatest opportunity to contact—”

            “Shut down?”

            “We lost funding. As far as I know, they went back to—wherever they came from. This could have changed history.” His voice was hoarse as he whispered into his phone. “Now it’s over. Thanks to you.”

            I wasn’t the one who used kids—and his own daughter—as experiment subjects. “Glad you’re doing well.” I hung up.

            So those aliens were gone. Maybe. How many other aliens were checking out our planet? I searched Silvano’s files and found a few vague references to Bracken Tech, the college outside Chicago where Winters had worked. Silvano apparently never got very far with them.

            I poured myself a fresh cup of coffee. Rikki Silvano had given me a list of her husband’s friends and contacts—both UFO enthusiasts themselves and professional associates through his tech work. Some of them I found in his files.

            I started pushing numbers on my phone. Lots of detective work, like being a reporter, is just talking to people and asking questions, mixed in with internet research.

            No one had heard from Silvano in more than a week. Most of them sounded concerned, although some of his UFO-hunting friends hung up when they heard Silvano’s name. Paranoia? They didn’t know me, of course. I made notes and kept going.

            Between calls, more coffee, and bathroom breaks, I checked out the file on Hawke Electronics. A seven-year-old startup, it offered “cutting-edge technology” to small businesses for marketing, customer relationship management, and PR. Its main product was an artificial intelligence platform called XN.

            Tucked inside a folder named “BR” I found a series of emails that Rachel had highlighted.

            It was unclear who’d contacted who first. The earliest email was from O’Connor, ten days ago: “Maybe. Call me in 20 mins.”

            After that was an email from Silvano: “Good talk. Let’s meet.”

            Then a similarly terse response from O’Connor. “Thursday not tomorrow. Same time.”

            The last email came from O’Connor as well: “I’ve got the XN-12. I’ll bring it.”

            That one was dated six days ago, at 7:02 a.m. Right around the time Silvano had dropped out of sight.  

            I skimmed the rest of the files. Most of them held documents and images—computer code, and photos of computer elements. The code made no sense to me, and the tech? I’ve taken a DVD player apart once, but I’m no engineer.

So I went directly to the Hawke site. It touted an AI platform called XN as its premium product, with different pricing for various iterations: XN-2, XN Plus, XN Platinum, XN Basic, and more. The fees were—more than enough to pay my cable bill from now until the heat death of the universe.

No mention of XN-12 that O’Connor had promised to show Silvano.

            Was this just industrial espionage? Silvano was a tech consultant, after all. But right now Brent O’Connor was my best lead.

            And he was dead.

            I’m not very brave. Murder scares me, whether it’s human or supernatural. If O’Connor had been killed because of the XN-12—whatever that was—I wasn’t sure I wanted to get anywhere near it.

            On the other hand, Rikki Silvano had hired me to do a job. And I’ve always been too curious for my own good.

I ran a search. Brent O’Connor still had a photo on the “About Us” page. I didn’t look at his face for very long. I still saw the blood on his chest.

            Then I downloaded a sample version of XN to my computer. It seemed relatively simple to use—plug in names, add some data, and it would make predictions about customer behavior. I couldn’t test it out without sharing the kind of sales figures that didn’t apply to my business.

So I called Rachel. She didn’t answer—probably working, she’s a graphic designer—so I left a message: “When you have time, could you come down and take a look at a new app for me? It’s called XN, and it’s from Hawke. Thanks. Uh, love you.”

            Then I called Rikki Silvano. She’d never heard of XN. She only wanted to know where her husband was.

            I couldn’t tell her much. Fortunately, she didn’t get upset. Even though the edge in her voice sound close to panic.

            I hung up. The answers I was looking for were at Hawke Electronics. I was going to have to make a visit.