The Roswell Conspiracy Read online

  She stood. “One more thing.”

  “Yes?” he said, coming around his desk.

  “If you attempt to warn Colchev that we are coming, you won’t live to the end of next week.”

  “No need to threaten me, Ms. Bedova. I’m fully invested in your success. Literally.”

  She nodded and walked out. While she rode the elevator down, she texted her team.

  Find out how quickly we can charter a flight to Alice Springs.

  FOURTEEN

  “I don’t care what it costs,” Jess said to Tyler and Grant, putting her phone away and taking a seat on the sofa next to Fay. “We need your help.”

  While Jess had taken a call, the rest of them had moved to the living room for coffee and gone over Fay’s story twice more. The tale was the same all three times, so Tyler was confident Fay wasn’t lying. Whether she had all the facts right was another matter. Memories could grow hazy over that stretch of time.

  Jess seemed surprised that Tyler hadn’t jumped at the chance to join them on their quest. “Come on? What do you say? Want to have an adventure?”

  Tyler glanced uncomfortably at Grant, who shrugged as if to say, “Why not?”

  “Don’t you think a private detective would be a better choice?” Tyler said. “We’re engineers.”

  “But you’re also investigators. Who else would I hire? Some local PI who tracks down ex-husbands late on their child support?”

  “You need some kind of international investigation firm.”

  “How much more international can a firm be than Gordian? Your website says you have offices in thirty-five countries.”

  “But you also want to find out how the Roswell incident is connected to the Nazca lines. Don’t you want an archaeologist?”

  “I’ve already talked to a dozen archaeologists,” Fay said. “They all thought I was crazy.”

  “Besides,” Jess said, “Nana has been working on this for five years nonstop. She could have a PhD in the subject by now if she had gone to school for it. I bet she knows as much about the Nazca culture as anyone.”

  “What do you want us to do?” Grant said.

  “We want you to help us track down whoever it was that attacked me,” Fay said. “They have to have some answers about the engraving.”

  “At the very least we have to know why they want the artifact,” Jess said.

  Tyler’s eyes went to the engraving. “Did you show it to the police?”

  “Yes,” Fay said. “They didn’t believe me. They think this is about something else.”

  “Like what?”

  “They said they think it was a pair of robbers who showed up under false pretenses to get the cash in my house.”

  “How much cash?”

  “I have a safe with a hundred thousand dollars inside. Part of Henare’s life insurance payout. I use the money to pay for travel to Peru twice a year to study the Nazca lines and their ancient city of Cahuachi. The safe’s fireproof, so it survived. The police think I must have told someone about it, but I didn’t. I have no idea how thieves could have known about the money.”

  “Why would they burn down your house and chase us if they were looking for cash?” Tyler said. “Burglars would have bugged out when things got hairy.”

  Fay shrugged. “I’m just telling you the police’s current theory. I’m sure it’ll change, but they said the investigation might take a while.”

  “And we don’t have that much time,” Jess said. “More men could come back at any time.”

  “Or never,” Grant said.

  “Maybe. But until we find out what was so important about this piece of wood, Nana and I will be looking over our shoulders constantly. Even if she gives it to someone else, she may not be safe.”

  Tyler sighed and looked at Grant. “What do you think?”

  “I’m up for it if you are. We were going to take a few days off anyway.”

  Jess and Fay looked at him expectantly. Finally, Tyler said, “All right. We’ll do what we can.”

  Jess pumped her fists in the air. “Yes! I knew you wouldn’t let us down.”

  “Thank you so much,” Fay said.

  “The only problem is that we don’t have many leads,” Tyler said. “We’ll contact Billy Raymond and see if anyone has asked him about Fay, since the video seems the likely place where these guys heard about you.”

  “I’ll get on that,” Grant said, and took out his phone as he left the room.

  “We can take the piece of wreckage and the engraving back with us to Seattle for analysis in our lab. We might get some new info about the materials used.”

  “We might want to put that off for a while and go another direction,” Jess said. “The phone call I took was from a contact I have with the police.”

  “You have an in with the cops?” Tyler said.

  “I still do occasional decoding work for them.”

  “Do the police have a lead?” Tyler said.

  Jess nodded. “Yes, they do, but they think it’s pretty thin. One of the tourists at Shotover Jet posted a video online of you three commandeering the jet boat. He also caught the men chasing you on camera. Apparently it’s plastered all over the Web.”

  “Someone recognized Foreman and Blaine?” Tyler asked.

  “So he claims. An Australian student at a Charles Darwin University extension campus. He emailed the police telling them that he thinks he saw one of the men last week.”

  “Where was this?”

  “At a research facility just outside Alice Springs in central Australia. The student’s name is Jeremy Hyland.”

  “Are the police following up on it?”

  Jess shook her head. “Foreman and Blaine’s passports had no stamps for Australia, so the New Zealand police thought it was just the ramblings of an overexcited kid, even though he provided a pretty detailed description of Blaine. They’re swamped with the rest of the investigation right now, so his lead is a low priority.”

  “Why do you think he’s right?” Tyler asked.

  “Because I called Hyland. He said he’s pretty sure he saw Blaine at his university facility. He was driving the car of a man who came to see their research.”

  “Pretty sure doesn’t sound very sure.”

  “He also mentioned that Blaine was missing part of his left ear.”

  That got Tyler’s attention. He thought back to his fight on the jet boat and remembered Blaine’s torn left earlobe up close, just before Blaine was crushed against the rock outcropping, most likely mangling the evidence of the disfigurement.

  But Fay had noticed it, too.

  “That’s him!” she blurted out. “It looked like the lower part of Blaine’s ear had been ripped off. He must be the man the student saw.”

  “And even better,” Jess said, “the student claims to have seen Blaine’s passenger just yesterday driving down the main highway through Alice Springs.”

  “What is Hyland’s research about?” Tyler said. “Anything to do with Roswell?”

  Jess shook her head. “He works on a project called CAPEK, or Computer-Automated Payload Extension Kit. It’s autonomous vehicle research funded by the trucking industry.”

  Tyler chuckled. “They named their robotic truck after Karel Capek.”

  “Who’s that?” Fay said.

  “He’s a Czech writer who coined the word ‘robot’ in a play called R.U.R., which stands for Rossum’s Universal Robots.” When Tyler saw Fay and Jess’s surprise at his knowledge of this bit of trivia, he added, “Another work featured in my sci-fi course.”

  Jess took the wood engraving. “Why are the men who are willing to kill for Nana’s artifact interested in a robotic truck in the middle of Australia?”

  “I guess we’ll have to ask the researchers,” Tyler said. “And I think we should do it in person. We might be able to track down the man who was with Blaine.”

  “I was hoping you’d say that. Because we’re going with you. There’s a flight to Sydney that leaves Queenst
own in two hours. Then we can catch a connection to Alice Springs.”

  Before Tyler could protest, Grant returned with a grim expression.

  “What’s the matter?” Tyler asked.

  “It’s Billy Raymond, the guy who shot Fay’s Roswell video,” Grant said.

  “What about him?”

  “Three days ago he was killed.”

  PINE GAP

  FIFTEEN

  Starbucks hadn’t yet opened a franchise in Alice Springs, so as he steered the rented Jeep out of the city, Tyler drank a cup of truck-stop coffee strong enough to be used as an industrial solvent. He supposed that made sense, given the vast stretches of outback drivers would have to cross to get anywhere else.

  Alice Springs was the largest town for eight hundred miles, and in the short time he’d been there, Tyler had sensed an independent nature that was likely characteristic of the 27,000 inhabitants. Despite its geographic isolation, the town was no stranger to strangers. Visiting ranchers, miners, explorers, and truckers making the long haul between Adelaide to the south and Darwin to the north were the lifeblood of the city.

  Still, the group he was with surely stood out. Grant was next to him, with Jess and Fay in the back. The four of them together wouldn’t go unnoticed for long, which was why they’d kept a low profile coming into town.

  Tyler involuntarily glanced in the mirror at Jess and she caught him looking. They’d had no time alone to talk during the trip, and maybe that was for the best. He was still attracted to her, still felt the pull between them, but trying to start something up again after all this time, under these circumstances, was a ridiculous thought. In any case he didn’t get the sense that she wanted anything from him except help in solving their mystery. He would approach this job as a professional, nothing more.

  Right. If that were true, why couldn’t he stop looking in the mirror?

  To distract himself, Tyler focused on the upcoming meeting with Jeremy Hyland at the CAPEK facility. With no inkling to how CAPEK might be connected, they thought it safer to use Tyler’s status as chief engineer at Gordian to arrange a nine a.m. meeting with the student, without mentioning his tip to the New Zealand police.

  Because the flight from the US to New Zealand was so long, Tyler hadn’t used one of Gordian’s Gulfstream private jets for the trip, which meant they’d had to fly commercial to Alice Springs. With the connection, the flight from Queenstown had taken seven hours, and during that time they’d rehashed the events of the previous day and the possible meaning of Fay’s artifact with no further insight.

  The only new information they’d gleaned during the stopover in Sydney was that Billy Raymond had been struck by a pickup in a Phoenix shopping mall parking lot. There were no witnesses to the hit-and-run. The pickup, stolen earlier that day, was eventually found, but the police had no further leads. They believed the culprit was a car thief or joyriding teenager who got scared and fled the scene.

  Nobody in Tyler’s group, however, thought Raymond’s death was coincidental. For some reason, Blaine, who’d traveled all the way to New Zealand to steal a seemingly worthless artifact, kill Fay Turia, and burn down her house to cover the evidence, had been at a high-tech experimental research facility in the middle of Australia less than a week before. And his likeliest connection to Fay was Billy Raymond, now lying in an Arizona grave.

  Though Tyler didn’t believe in alien visitors to Earth, he did think Fay’s relic had some significance that they hadn’t yet divined. They were obviously missing crucial information that would shed light on why the wood engraving was so important, and they were all hoping Jeremy Hyland could point them in the right direction.

  “I’m coming in with you to see Hyland,” Fay said.

  A night’s sleep in the local motel obviously hadn’t changed her mind.

  “Fay,” Tyler said, “we don’t know how CAPEK figures into this.”

  “Blaine’s partners could be watching the place,” Grant said.

  “I’d feel better if you stayed in the car until we check them out. In fact, I’d rather you stayed back at the hotel.”

  “I didn’t come three thousand miles to wait in the car like a little girl. If this Hyland kid knows something, I want to be there.”

  Tyler looked in the rearview mirror at Jess. “Your call. Blaine’s friends might still be around.”

  “If that’s the case, then they probably saw you on that tourist’s video of the jet boat dock,” she said. “We’ll all go in.”

  Tyler shook his head. “All right.”

  The trip from Alice Springs to the project headquarters north of the city took fifteen minutes. They turned onto a dusty road labeled with a small sign saying, “Charles Darwin University—Transportation Research Center”.

  Though CDU had an extension in Alice Springs, the newly created research facility was located outside of town so that its vehicles could access the Northern Territory highways more easily during road testing. A half-mile down the road, Tyler saw the low-slung building rising from the scrubby desert. Because it was a Sunday, only a few cars were parked in the lot.

  Tyler was about to park in front of the entrance when he noticed that a garage door was open on the side of the building. He wheeled the Jeep around and stopped next to it. He could see a man hunched over the hood of a car.

  The four of them got out. The clear blue sky was cloudless all the way to the low mountain ridges to the south. The winter air was cool but pleasant, requiring nothing heavier than a windbreaker. Grant would have been sweltering in the parka, which meant Tyler was spared another day with Sergeant Traffic Cone.

  The man inside the garage heard the doors slam and looked up. He couldn’t have been older than twenty and had grease stains on his sunburned cheeks. Tyler recognized him as Jeremy Hyland from the bios and photos posted on the CAPEK project’s website.

  “You Dr. Locke?” Hyland said with a heavy Australian accent.

  “I am,” he said and introduced the others, eliciting a round of g’days. “You must be Jeremy.”

  “That’s right. I’d shake your hand, but I’m not very presentable at the moment.”

  “Thanks for taking the time to meet with us.”

  “No worries. Any chance to meet the chief engineer from Gordian.”

  “You’ve heard of his company?” Jess asked.

  “Heard of them? Any engineer would give their right arm to work there. Say, would you put in a good word for me at the Sydney office?”

  “I’ll see what I can do,” Tyler said.

  “So what can I help you …” All of a sudden, Hyland’s eyes went wide with recognition. “Hold on! You three were in the video!”

  Tyler nodded. “That’s actually why we’re here.”

  Hyland grinned. “Wait’ll I tell my mates. I couldn’t believe it when the jet boat rolled over onto the beach. That was bloody bonzer!”

  “We understand you recognized one of the men chasing us.”

  “I emailed the Kiwi police about it, but I suppose they thought I was some kind of nutter.”

  “You sure it was the same guy?”

  “He was sitting in the driver’s seat of a car right where yours is. I was walking by and only saw him from the side. That’s why I wasn’t sure it was him in the video. But that mess of an ear was hard to forget.”

  “What about the man he was chauffeuring around?”

  “I never spoke to his boss. I went back to work while my professor gave him a tour of the place. Said he was some kind of corporate sponsor.”

  “Do you remember the boss’s name?”

  Hyland shook his head. “Some gray-haired bloke. Wasn’t old, though. Looked like he could wrestle a croc and win.”

  “How about his company?”

  “Sorry. You’d have to ask Professor Stevens.”

  “Where can we find him?”

  “Don’t know. CAPEK and the van were gone when I got here this morning. He left a message that he was taking it out for a run.”

>   “You mean the robotic truck?”

  Hyland nodded. “Beautiful piece of work, if I do say so myself. Gonna revolutionize shipping in Australia, although the truckies won’t care for it.”

  “The truck drivers?” Fay said. “Why?”

  “Well, it’s a robotic truck, you see. We’ve got thousands of miles of desolate roads running through the outback. CAPEK is the first step in making them autonomous vehicles. Operating in remote regions to start with, of course. Private mines. Sheep stations. Like that. But eventually they could travel all the way from Darwin to Adelaide using GPS and on-board cameras.”

  “How close are you to becoming operational?” Grant asked.

  “We’re there now if the government would certify us. We’ve put forty thousand miles on CAPEK so far, though we’ve had someone in the driver’s seat the whole time in case there’s a problem. Haven’t had a single incident.”

  “Did you have a test today?” Tyler said.

  “It wasn’t on the schedule. I imagine Professor Stevens wanted to do some fine-tuning.”

  “How does it work?”

  “The truck can be driven normally, but once the robotic system is activated, the driving functions are totally autonomous. We have a chase van used for control and monitoring. The truck uses sensors, GPS navigation, and computer-controlled servomechanisms to stay on the road, and the person monitoring in the van gives it commands to start, stop, and turn. Eventually you’ll be able to plug in a destination with no further input. While we’re testing, you usually need three people to operate it: one in CAPEK, one to drive the van, and one in the back of the van monitoring.”

  Hyland frowned.

  “What’s the matter?” Tyler asked.

  “Oh, nothing. It’s just that I was surprised they took it out without me. It being winter break, the only other student around is Milo Beech.”

  “So it’s just the three of you? Isn’t it odd for you not to go with them?”

  “I suppose it’s not that unusual. The professor must have had his reasons. And it’s easy enough for two people to do. They find a stretch of road, park the van, and drive the truck up and down to collect data.”