The Bid

by Adrian Magson

“UFOs?” Ruth echoed.

  Dave grinned. “It wouldn’t be the first time; any kind of unexplained lights in the sky, it’s got to be UFOs or a government black operation of some kind. But the kids say one of their school friends who lives over that way was out looking for rabbits a couple of nights ago and claims he found some busted-up machinery he saw come down from outer space. They asked to see it but he’s holding out for some money from the local county newspaper and told them to get lost. Putting it politely, they say the kid, whose name is Clay, is short a few balls of twine and talks crap most of the time, so there’s probably nothing to see.”

  “What do you think?”

  “Well, we’ve got a name and it’s close enough, so I figure it’s worth going up there and having a chat, don’t you?”

  The flight took only a few minutes, and they landed alongside a small ranch-style farm with a couple of barns surrounded by open grass fields. As the three of them climbed out, the front door of the house opened and a woman stepped out followed by two teenagers, a boy and a girl wearing battered jeans and sneakers.

  “Ma’am,” said Dave politely. “Sorry to bust in on your day like this, but we’re looking for some information and we hope you can help us.” He pointed at Ruth and Vaslik. “This is Ruth Gonzales from London and Andy Vaslik from New York. They’re a couple of investigators.”

  The woman smiled at the courtesy. She was thin and tanned with a freckled face and wiry auburn hair, and looked tired. “Well, you’re not busting in on anything that can’t be ignored. My name’s Janice Bernhauer and these two are Clay and Judy.” She looked at Ruth. “All the way from London? You must be dry as dust. You want a cold drink?” She didn’t wait for a reply but turned back inside, shooing the children in front of her.

  The main room was neat and comfortable, with a long sofa, two armchairs, an air-conditioning fan blowing in one corner, a vast television in the other, and a stack of books and magazines on shelves and side tables.

  “You folks do a lot of reading,” Dave said, picking up a copy of a magazine with a garish-looking front cover sporting a shot of outer space with a disc-shaped object in the middle.

  “That and television, DVDs,” the woman said, coming back with a tray and four glasses of lemonade, which she handed out. “There’s nothing much else to do out here, so we keep ourselves entertained.” She sat down on the sofa and the children sat either side of her. “Now, how can I help?”

  Dave looked at Ruth, who picked up the baton. “We’re trying to find a man who’s gone missing, Janice. We have reason to believe he might have come out this way.”

  Janice shook her head. “Well, we don’t see many folks around here, but those we do, we notice. A man, you say?”

  “Yes. In his forties, tall, dark-haired. A business type.”

  Janice looked at the two children. “Have you two seen any people you don’t know?” She looked at Ruth again. “They get out more than I do, so if anybody came by, they’d probably see them. How about it, you guys?”

  The girl, Judy, shook her head, eyes fastened on Vaslik as if he’d jumped out of the pages of a movie magazine. Vaslik pretended not to notice and looked at Clay, who wasn’t saying or doing anything but looking slightly uncomfortable.

  “Clay?” His mother noticed and scowled at him. “Speak up, boy. I know you’re holding something in, there.”

  “He told everybody he found a UFO,” Judy burst out, and threw a needle-sharp look at her brother. “An unidentified flying object. It was all bust up, too.”

  “Clay?” Janice stared hard at her son, who had gone deep red and was giving his sister the evil eye. “You found what? Tell me you’re lying.”

  Clay shook his head. “It’s true,” he burst out. “It was up by the old riverbed. I knew there had to be something because I’d heard noises a couple of times before. And this time there was this light—” He stopped speaking and looked at his mother.

  “Say what, Clay?” Janice’s voice was calm and soft, but full of parental threat. “If you saw lights, it must have been night—am I right? What have I told you about going out at night? What if you fell into a gully and broke your leg? And there are snakes out there!”

  Clay looked terrified but stubborn. Vaslik leaned forward. “You can tell us, Clay. It might be important in finding this missing man. What did you find, when, and where?”

  “Is there a reward?” Clay was pale with guilt but clearly not above profiting from what he knew.

  “If your mother says it’s okay, then maybe. It depends what you tell us.”

  Janice hesitated, then nodded. “All right—but don’t think you’ve got away with this, young man. You know what being grounded means? Well, in case you’ve forgotten, you’re about to be reminded big-time—and that mountain bike along with you. Now tell the gentleman or I’ll double it and add ten.”

  Clay scowled but said, “It’s about four miles from here, in a dried-out riverbed close by an old airfield. It’s a good place to find rabbits and stuff. I took my bike up there three nights ago, to watch some burrows. There was a good moon and I heard this noise up in the sky, a sort of buzzing sound like a hornet. It freaked me out at first because”—he hesitated and looked embarrassed—“I thought it was a UFO. But then I figured it must be a small plane. Then I realised it was real close, but still not loud.”

  “Good,” Vaslik encouraged. “What else?”

  “The noise got closer, but it was too dark to see anything at first. Then I saw a red light, and it was moving real quick but in a crazy way, like it was out of control, going one way then the other. After a while it went away, although not far, so I followed. I saw it go up in the air, then it went down again and—” He made a noise with his mouth as if he was clearing his throat and threw his hands in the air.

  “It crashed, huh?”

  “It sure did. One second it was in the air, the next it hit the ground, and all I heard was a crunch and somebody yelling. He sounded real mad so I kept my head down.”

  Vaslik nodded. “Sounds like it might have been a model plane of some kind, wouldn’t you say, Clay?”

  “I guess.” The boy looked at his mother but got a stony look in return. “Except …”

  “Except?”

  “It wasn’t.”

  “How do you know that? Did you see it?”

  Clay nodded. “Some of it. I waited a real long time, till I was sure the men had gone away. Then I took a closer look at the place where it had come down.”

  “What did you find?”

  “Bits and pieces. Plastic mostly, and some metal … and some glass bits like a camera lens.”

  There was a short silence. “So this man took whatever it was away with him?”

  Clay shook his head. “No, sir. They left it where it was.”

  “They? There was more than one man?”

  “There were three. Well, actually four, only I don’t think the fourth guy wanted to be seen.”

  “What makes you say that?”

  “Because he was lying on the ground about fifty yards away and watching them. I saw him because he didn’t know squat about moving at night. I don’t know what he looked like, though—he was just a shadow in the dark. But as soon as the plane hit the ground, he checked out of there without the others seeing him and went off towards the old airfield.”

  Another silence. Then Dave said softly, “Which old airfield’s that, son?”

  thirty-four

  “It’s an old place built in the fifties,” Janice put in. “Something to do with the Cold War that never came to anything, thank the Lord. They built it along with a hangar and runway and stuff, but it was never listed and never went—what do you call it?—operational. My father said it was a big secret that got forgotten. Nobody uses it for anything now. Leastways, nothing good, if my sense of smell tells me anything.”

  “W
hat do you mean?”

  “Well, last night the wind was coming from over there and I swear I could smell smoke. You get kids or young people finding a place like that and they like to think it doesn’t belong to anybody so they start fooling around. Could be nothing, of course, but something was burning.”

  “Do you know if the fire department came out?”

  “I doubt that, frankly. Our local department’s had some serious budget cuts and they don’t go anywhere they don’t have to unless there’s a threat to life or livestock. And I doubt an abandoned airfield meets either of those, if you know what I mean. All told, the place was a huge waste of money and it’s better if they let it burn down if you ask me.” She gave Clay a fierce look that made him shrink in his seat. “I told my kids to stay right away from there—the place is already falling-down dangerous. You don’t know what else they built down there. Could be underground chambers and shafts or silos and the Good Lord knows what. It didn’t need a fire to make it any more dangerous.”

  “Mom, I never went inside—” Clay protested, but her look silenced him.

  “I think we should take a look at this place,” said Ruth, and she looked at Janice. “Would you mind Clay showing us where he saw the men?”

  Clay’s eyes went big at the prospect, but Janice’s went bigger. “Will it be safe over there?”

  “Safe as houses,” Dave assured her. “We’ll take a look overhead first, just to make sure. Then we’ll go in on the ground.” He looked at Clay. “You okay with flying, son?”

  He might as well have handed Clay the keys to Disney. The teen nodded with enthusiasm and jumped to his feet.

  “I’ve got stuff to show you first,” he said. “I brought back some pieces of the machine. They’re in the barn.”

  Ruth caught the surprised look from Janice and forestalled another lecture. “That was clever thinking, Clay. Let’s have a look, shall we?”

  They all trooped outside and into the barn, which smelled of warm hay and horses. A few chickens were pecking at the ground and shafts of sunlight coming through gaps in the wooden planking lent the interior of the building a comfortable atmosphere.

  Clay went over to one corner and pulled aside a tarp, then stood back so they could see what he’d found. It looked like so much junk plastic that had been hit with a large hammer, but Dave Proust squatted down and immediately plucked one object out from the pile and held it in the air.

  “Far as I know,” he said, “UFOs don’t have propellers.”

  Ruth and Vaslik inspected it. It was small, no more than a few inches, but made of a durable plastic.

  “I’d say this was a quad-copter,” Dave continued. “I’ve seen them before. Most are small—like the kind kids would play with, even indoors. But I’d say this model was quite a bit bigger.” He sorted through the pile and picked up a section of gleaming white plastic with stylised letters emblazoned across it: Eur. A jagged edge had cut off any further lettering, but Ruth and Vaslik could see what it was immediately.

  “EuroVol,” Ruth murmured. “It’s one of their stolen drones.”

  With Janice’s agreement, they went back to the helicopter and climbed aboard. It was a squeeze, but they were only going a short distance. Following an ecstatic Clay’s directions, they took off and flew for about two miles until they saw an unnaturally straight line in the ground below. It was a runway.

  Then they saw the smoke.

  It was hanging in the atmosphere over the field and barely moving, a long pall of dark smoke spread out in a tail where the turgid movement of air had gathered it up and pushed it slowly away from its source—a large square of blackened and crumpled steelwork that had once been a hangar. Beyond it was another shape, this one much smaller but also smoking, although still standing.

  Dave took them in on a curving course around the area and away from the smoke. There were no signs of vehicles or life, nothing to indicate what might have happened here. The airfield appeared to have been substantial in size, but if there had been any real intent about its development during the Cold War era, it would have possibly been for remote operations to be sited here in the event that known military fields were put out of action.

  “Let’s go see the place where you found the crashed drone first,” said Dave and followed the boy’s directions to the edge of a gulley nearby, where there was a safe spot of flat ground to land.

  Once the rotor stopped turning, they climbed out and Clay led them to a jumble of rocks and bushes, and pointed to a collection of plastic, electronics, and wiring scattered on the ground.

  “See? Right here.”

  Closer inspection of the remains and the rest of some lettering on the side confirmed that the drone—or quad-copter—was a EuroVol machine. The casing had shattered on impact, revealing the interior with its wiring and circuits, and underneath, between broken skids, was a battered camera with a broken lens. There was also a tubular section of clear plastic with wiring soldered to one end, and mounts that had clearly been ripped away from the body of the drone on impact.

  “We’d better take this in,” Ruth suggested quietly, so that Clay wouldn’t hear. “This was obviously a practice run that didn’t end well. But if they stole six machines in all, they’ve got spares enough to play with.”

  “But will it be enough to convince Kraski that it’s serious?” said Vaslik.

  “Kraski?” Dave looked up from a section of motherboard. “John Kraski?”

  “You know him?”

  “Yes, I do.” His expression could have curdled milk. “I thought he’d have been retired by now. We crossed swords a couple of times before he moved into the Internal Investigations Section, which would’ve suited him like a second skin. Sounds like he’s found himself another new home, though.”

  “Can he really block any reports made through Tom Brasher?”

  “I doubt that. He probably thinks he can because he’s a self-important asshole. But if Tom Brasher’s as convinced about this stuff as you two, he’ll make sure it doesn’t get stamped on. The one thing nobody’s going to take a chance on is the president’s life.”

  Using a bag from the helicopter’s stowage rack, they collected as many of the pieces of the drone as they could find, then scouted the rest of the area in a widening circle to make sure they had missed nothing.

  It was Clay who found something, but without realising what until Ruth saw his fingers and the soles of his trainers. They carried traces of something bright red, and she thought he’d cut himself scrabbling about in the rocks.

  “It won’t come off,” he said after trying to wipe the colour away. “Jeez—Mom’s going to ground me forever!”

  “Don’t worry about that,” Ruth told him. “Show us where you’ve just been.”

  Clay led them over to the edge of the runway about eighty yards away, and a large rock. Both the rock and the ground around it were stained red.

  Vaslik inspected the colour without touching it. “It looks to me like a powdered dye,” he said quietly. “But we should get Brasher’s people to test it, just in case. Isn’t that what Paget said the drones had been ordered and modified to carry?”

  Ruth nodded. “He did. Maybe they were using powdered dye to make their test runs.”

  “Could be. Let’s just hope that’s all it was.”

  Dave flew them all back to Clay’s home. On the way, he gave the boy a stern warning.

  “Now we know you’ve been telling your pals at school that you’ve got a UFO tucked away, and that you hope to sell the idea to a newspaper. Am I right?”

  Clay looked horrified. “Shit. How do you know that?”

  Dave put his finger alongside his nose. “Trust me, son. We know a lot of shit. And don’t swear—it ain’t nice.”

  Clay didn’t say anything but stared out of the window. As they dropped towards the house they could see a pickup in the yard
and a man talking to Janice. “That’s my dad,” Clay murmured. “Am I in trouble?”

  Dave shook his head. “No, son. We’ll square everything away with him and tell him how helpful you’ve been. But hear me out: no kidding anybody about UFOs, understand? Tell them what you saw was part of a weather balloon. We don’t want good decent folks like your mom getting scared about aliens, do we?”

  Clay nodded. “Okay. Do I get a reward?”

  “Well, I’m not sure we can give you any money, but how about a note of thanks from the FBI? Of course, we’ll have to run it past your parents first.”

  Twenty minutes later they took off again and headed back to the airfield, leaving a proud boy with his parents and a promise that Special Agent Tom Brasher would be sending him a letter of thanks.

  As the rotors came to a stop and they sat looking at the remains of what had once been an enormous hangar, Ruth’s phone buzzed. It was Brasher. She turned on the loudspeaker so they could all hear what he had to say.

  “We just got a call from the Oklahoma State Police,” he announced. “They picked up a kid not far from Alva, Oklahoma. He got stupid drunk in a bar and started mouthing off about—and I quote loosely—‘kuffars and insects delivering the sting of death from the sky … your own toys of death spraying our message of destruction on the head of your leader and ending his tyranny. Allah be praised.’ And more stuff like that. He was lucky that two of the guys he was screaming at were state troopers. They hauled him out of there ‘before he got himself lynched.’ It took a while for us to hear about it until his name got through the system and they checked into his background. Then they called it in.”

  “Is he for real?” said Vaslik.

  “Sounds like it to me, even without looking at his personal details. That stuff about spraying destruction and toys of death … that sounds like he was talking drones to me. When we ran his name it lit up a few lights. It turns out he’s called Donny Bashir, and he’s a known associate of Bilal Ammar, the bodybuilder who was seen talking to Chadwick’s mystery man in Newark. They even attended the same mosque.”