Hansen and his father — who resembled a bespectacled, gray-haired scarecrow — were out on the front porch of his parents’ three-bedroom ranch house, about two miles down the road from the school where his dad taught. They’d just finished having dinner — barbecued ribs, along with Mom’s homemade macaroni and cheese and some baked potatoes, and were now nursing some beers and staring up at the night sky while seated in their rocking chairs. Mom and Gillespie insisted upon doing the dishes, even though that was Dad’s job: She cooked it; he cleaned it up. But since Hansen was visiting, the rules had changed, and Gillespie was having fun chatting with Mom, so she’d volunteered to help clean up. The conversation seemed to lift her spirits.
“This was such a great surprise, Ben,” Buck Hansen said. “And it gets me out of KP duty.”
“Like I said, Pop, sometimes they just throw us some time off. Good to be home. Just to smell it, you know?” He took a long breath through his nose and sighed. Texas. He could already hear the drawl returning to his voice.
The older Hansen laughed. “The ribs smelled great. But if you’re talking about all the horse dung and Joey Reynolds’s old pickup truck, the one that’s still burning oil…”
“Yeah, I actually was.”
“Well, then you’re nuts.”
“Just smells like home. So how’s it going?”
“Same old, same old.” His father squinted into the night sky, rubbing the gray stubble on his chin.
“I’m afraid to ask what you’re looking for.”
His dad turned suddenly and faced him. “Two nights ago I was out here, and I saw something again.”
Hansen took a long pull on his beer. “I believe you, Dad.”
“You know, I was thinking, what with you working for the government all this time, maybe you’d be willing to change your mind about this. I’ve got some pictures I can show you.”
After tensing, Hansen sighed and said, “Dad, I’m just a low-level analyst. So is Kim. We can’t be hacking into government computers looking for UFO encounters and cover-ups. If I have any close encounters with hacking the system, I’ll be fired.”
“I know that, Son, I know it. But you can’t blame your old man for trying.”
“Why is this so important to you?”
“Well, it’s like Charlton Heston said in Planet of the Apes: I can’t help thinking somewhere in the universe there has to be something better than man. Has to be.”
“Why?”
“Because we’re all doomed to destroy ourselves.”
“I like your positive outlook on life.”
He took a sip of his beer. “And I like your taste in women. I do love a redhead.”
“She’s just a friend from work.”
“Good kisser?”
“Dad, come on.”
“You’re no fun.”
Hansen thought for a moment, then said, “Can I ask you something? You ever know anyone who killed himself?”
“Yeah, I knew a fella once.”
“Why’d he do it?”
“Wife left him. Took the kids. He got depressed. Starting messing up on the job. Got fired. Then one night we heard the gunshot, not that anyone was surprised. Why you asking me this?”
“I don’t know.”
“You’re not depressed, are you?”
“Me?”
“Well, yeah.”
“No, I’ve been busy with work, but we had a guy who might’ve done that.”
“Why you say that? Could’ve been murder.”
“No, he just kind of vanished. Might be dead or not. No body.”
Dad leaned forward in his chair. “There are certain members of our government who are more susceptible to alien abduction, you know that, Son, right?”
Hansen repressed the desire to roll his eyes, sipped his beer, and said, “Good point, Dad. Good point.”
“All I’m saying is that you cannot rule out the possibility.”
“No, sir.”
Gillespie came out onto the porch, beer in hand. “Mr. Hansen, I want to thank you for dinner. I really enjoyed it.”
“You’re welcome, sweetie. Anytime. Now, I’d better close my mouth because anything else I say is going to deeply embarrass my son.”
Hansen smiled at his father. “Dad, after all these years, you’re finally learning.”
He winked. “Sometimes we teachers are the worst students.”
35
The call had come in at 3:00 A.M., and Hansen and the team were back in the air and racing toward Odessa, with a plane change in Frankfurt.
Unsurprisingly, Fisher had quite literarily returned from the depths of the Rhine and had resurfaced in the Ukraine. According to Grim, Fisher was seeking medical treatment from an old friend, Adrik Ivanov, a former medic in the Russian army. Ivanov was single, in his fifties, and a compulsive gambler who’d been hard-pressed to hold a steady job since being discharged.
It wasn’t until they were on the ground in Odessa, at 9:40 P.M., that Grim came through with the particulars: Ivanov lived in a duplex near the Tairov cemetery but spent most of his free time at a bar adjacent to the Chornoye More hotel. Hansen had asked if the man was an alcoholic, and Grim had only snickered. Of course he was. Moreover, something in her tone told Hansen that Fisher wasn’t really going to see Ivanov for medical attention; in fact, all of it sounded exactly like another ploy. Hansen already had his guard up.
Moreau said that surveillance on Ivanov’s duplex apartment indicated no lights, assumedly no one home, but Hansen sent Valentina and Gillespie up for a look anyway. They picked the lock, searched the place, and found no evidence of Fisher having been there or any medical treatment performed.
Grim then told them that Ivanov worked as a night watchman at a LUKOIL warehouse annex at the city’s northern industrial docks. LUKOIL was the largest oil company in Russia and its largest producer of oil, with obviously relaxed standards for its security guards. Grim followed up with the warehouse’s location, uploaded directly to their OPSATs. Hansen found it interesting that she selectively released information, as though buying someone on the other end a little more time…
The team jammed into a single rental car and drove from Ivanov’s place to the warehouse, which was set off the road and about a hundred yards from the beach. Other warehouses were clustered around it, but most looked abandoned, with signs in Cyrillic indicating they were for lease.
They parked about two hundred yards away and skulked off into the complex, a refinery hub whose innards swept overhead, making Hansen feel as though they were in the bowels of a dying old beast. Some of the larger pipes snaked down through the lot and plunged into the sand at the beach line.
With a little help from Moreau, they pinpointed the LUKOIL annex, a redbrick building splotched with graffiti and long rust stains where broken gutters sent rainwater down the walls.
After a cursory scan of the building’s blueprints, and realizing that the annex had only one main door, Hansen ordered the team to fall in behind him.
“You want us to get in there with goggles and scan for heat signatures?” asked Gillespie.
“I’m not worried about it. I think we’ll find Ivanov, but I think Fisher’s long gone,” answered Hansen.
He worked his magic on the door’s lock and eased it open, stepping through with his SC pistol leading the way. The place was dimly lit by weak overhead bulbs and smelled like a combination of mold and rusting metal.
Gillespie, Valentina, Noboru, and Ames moved in behind him, and he sent Ames and Valentina off toward an office area visible behind glass walls while hand signaling Gillespie and Noboru to work the perimeter and finish clearing the place.
The annex was relatively small, perhaps fifteen hundred square feet, and split on the right side by twenty-foot-tall rack shelves buckling under the weight of boxes and crates. A few rows of fifty-five-gallon drums labeled as cleaning solution were stacked three high, off to the left, creating a wall of curving metal.