I ka pau ʻole a ma hope loa aku

by elfinblue

Author's note: Sorry this has taken longer to get out! I've gotten to the point where I have to take all the clues I tossed in willy-nilly and try to weave them into a coherent whole. I've been doing research and I've tried to make the science at least sound like it makes sense, but please remember that I'm not a scientist. I just make stuff up, so don't try this at home. Also, I'm probably on a government watch list now for some of the things I've Googled. (Who am I kidding. I was probably on a watch list years ago.) Also, it seems I have a weakness for Danny whump. Who knew?

Chapter 11: The Truth is Out There

"Our working theory, at this point, is that a group of at least a dozen individuals have been passing themselves off as aliens in order to facilitate and obfuscate the theft of materials to build one or more so-called 'dirty bombs' and deliver them onto a beach. Does that sound right to you?"

"Obfuscate?" Steve echoed, eyes wide.

"Yes," Danny replied. "Obfuscate? You have a-you have a problem with my word choices?"

Steve considered, made a face, then shrugged and shook his head.

"Moving on," Lou prompted, drawing up a file on the smart table and gesturing to the information on his screen, "I believe we should consider what we know about them."

"What do we know about them?" Jerry asked. "It doesn't seem to me that we know very much?"

"You don't think so?" Steve asked.

"You do?"

"Let's start at the beginning. We know they know a lot about aliens and abduction stories because-correct me if I'm wrong here-these stories go back a lot further than the eight months or so during which we think this gang has been operating."

"Well, yeah," Jerry agreed. "They go back decades. Maybe centuries. Maybe even millennia."

"Okay," Danny leaned forward, counting points off on his fingers, "and we know they have alien costumes. Remember Steve's description of one of them as having two hands on each arm? I'm going to wager a guess here that the costumes have long arms to make them look disproportionate and the person in the costume had to put their real hands out some kind of opening partway up the forearm to operate the tablet he said they were using. So that tells us something specific about the costumes. Also, if I'm right about their floating platform, we know they have at least two drones-"

"And not just any drones," Steve put in. "Most drones you can buy on the open market only carry a pound or two. Even if you figure they used the drones to make the board float and then basically carried me on it, the board alone is going to weigh six or seven pounds."

"They did not seem to me to be carrying you," Danny said. "Steadying the board, yes. Carrying you, no. Certainly it did not inconvenience them when one of them let go to hit me with the lamp."

"So at least two supersized drones," Lou chipped in. "I've done a little research. They make drones that can carry up to five-hundred pounds now, but they aren't cheap."

"We know they're well-financed," Danny said.

"We know they have my lamp," Steve added.

"How's that going to help us find them?" Jerry asked.

"I didn't say it would. I'm just listing things we know about them."

"We know they were driving a dark green, 2008 Ford Econoline van and we've got a partial plate on that. And we should be able to learn something from the VIN number on the black Continental."

"Charlie Fong got back to me on that," Steve said. "That car was stolen from a dealership. Whoever did it bypassed the security cameras."

"Didn't the person who tried to break into the storage area at Pearl Harbor also bypass the cameras?"

"They did," Steve said. "Good catch, Jer. So we know they have skills with electronics. I don't know about the car dealership but the security system at Pearl is nothing to trifle with."

"But they weren't able to just bypass the security to actually open the storage compartment," Lou mused.

"They did know what they'd need to get through it, though," Danny said. "Handprint, voiceprint, security code, retina scan."

"But not that Jacobson has been conditioned to give them a false code that would have gotten them caught."

"The pair who came to see Danny," Steve said, "had no body hair, right?"

Danny nodded.

"So that explains why they didn't find any trace evidence in the Continental. They shaved their body hair off and wore gloves."

"But they didn't seem to realize I was a cop. And they didn't recognize you. As much as we've been on the news here the past few years, I'd at least expect them to recognize you. Although you were drunk and wearing Jacobson's coat."

"They're not Hawaiians and they're not connected to the Navy then, most likely. So they probably came here specifically for this operation? Why?" Steve asked.

"Because they intend to launch a dirty bomb onto a beach. One of the beaches here in Hawaii is their target."

"Terrorists," Lou said. "I hate terrorists. I'm gonna contact the NSA and Homeland Security and see if anybody they're watching has come to Hawaii in the past year."

"Good plan," Steve agreed. "I'm going to talk to Jacobson. Find out where his jacket has been in the past few days. I'll bug the lab for their report on that stain. If we're right and that's some kind of marker put there to identify him, that jacket crossed paths with one of our terrorists at some point."

"Not necessarily," Danny objected.

"How do you figure?"

"Think about Carpenter. Just some poor schmuck that gets kidnapped by aliens and sent in to slip you a micky. These guys use innocent people to do their dirty work. Drug them, frighten them, hell, maybe even hypnotize them."

"We're going to need a list of people in Hawaii who've reported being abducted by aliens in the last eight months," Lou said.

"I can do that," Jerry said. "But do you think they'll be able to tell us anything?"

"They don't have to know anything to be useful," Lou explained. "We can infer things from who was taken and when and from where. And maybe, just maybe, if we know where the aliens were on certain nights, we can find their green van on traffic cameras or security video. That might get us a shot of their human faces we can run through facial recognition software."

"And I," Danny said, "am going to do something I should have done days ago."

"What's that?" Steve asked.

"I'm going to go find a sketch artist and have them draw my visitors. I've already seen two of them, up close and personal. We can run them through the software now. Don't need body hair for that."

"And that," Lou said, poking Danny in the chest with his finger, "is why they've been trying to kill you."

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"Okay, so, making a list of alien abduction claimants isn't turning out to be as easy as I thought it would."

"Nobody fessing up to being kidnapped by ET?" Lou asked.

"Just the opposite," Jerry said. "I've studied UFOlogy for years, but even I'd never really realized how widespread these stories are. Some investigators estimate that two percent of the population has been abducted by aliens. That's 7,500 people just in Honolulu. There's even speculation that there's an alien base in the Waianae or Ko'olau mountains after a guy got a picture, in broad daylight, of a saucer-shaped UFO from Kaneohe Bay."

"So this line of investigation is a bust?"

Jerry shrugged and frowned down at the floor. "Looks like it. Sorry."

"Hey, not everything is gonna pan out. We still have Danny's description of the two who visited him. Maybe that'll get us somewhere. We also know they were at Steve's with that van Sunday night and we know they grabbed Carpenter Friday night. We can check cameras in those two areas. Maybe we'll get lucky. Why don't you check out costume shops and manufacturers and see if you can locate any alien costumes that match the descriptions we have?"

"I can do that. And I was thinking, where do you suppose that sand circle came from?"

Lou tipped his head, considering. "I can't say I've really thought about it. I'd guess they just used a blowtorch to melt the sand on the beach."

"I don't think it's that easy, though. Without industrial equipment, it can take a day or more to make glass from sand. And that circle wasn't little. They'd have had to melt a lot of sand to make it."

"I suppose that's right. I don't really know that much about making glass."

"From what I've read, it's a pretty complicated process. You have to have pure quartz sand and you have to add things to it to make it melt properly and not shatter. You can just use beach sand, but it's going to have impurities. It seems to me that it would have been simpler for them to make the circle somewhere else, or just buy one already made, and put it on the beach to make us think a UFO landed there."

"It's worth a look," Lou agreed. "Why don't you take Eric over with a truck and get it back to the lab?"

Jerry's face lit up. "I can do that?"

"It's your idea, man."

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"I had it dry-cleaned, of course," Jacobson said. "One does not report to a ceremony where one is going to be promoted to full Commander in a less-than-perfectly maintained dress uniform. I realize you don't know this, as this is not something you have ever done."

Steve rolled his eyes. "Where did you have it dry-cleaned?"

"The place I always have it dry-cleaned."

"And that would be...?"

Jacobson shrugged. "I don't know, man. My girlfriend always drops it off for me."

"You have a girlfriend? A human one?" Steve asked. "Because, knowing you, I kinda figured the blow-up sheep was it."

"Ha ha. Very funny. Yes, I have a human girlfriend. Her name is Ashley and she's hot."

"And inflatable? Look, never mind. Just call Ashley and find out where she left your uniform. I think that stain on the lining was some kind of chemical marker. If I'm right, the dry cleaner is as likely as anyone to be responsible for putting it there."

Steve hung up without waiting for a response. He was covering the area around the Navy base, asking shopkeepers and service personnel if they'd noticed anything "weird" in the last few months. Without prompting, he'd already gotten five accounts of UFOs seen in the area. All of them matched the description of the one in the video Jerry had shown him. He'd given a copy of the video to a friend in the military who agreed to analyze it for clues and he was waiting for Jacobson to get back to him with the name of the dry cleaner. The day had gotten late while they were getting Danny hypnotized and then hashing out their theories. Twilight settled over the sea and Steve hoped this dry cleaner had expanded hours.

His phone rang and a glance at the screen showed it to be Danny.

"Hey, what's up?"

"Hey is for horses. Seals eat fish."

"This SEAL could go for some shrimp," Steve suggested. "Maybe when I finish here we could head to Kamekona's? Where are you?"

"I'm just outside of HPD headquarters," Danny said. "The sketch artist wasn't available earlier so I'm going in now. Charlie Fong just called me. He tried to call you but you didn't answer."

Steve checked and saw he had a voicemail, but he was already talking to Danny so he asked him, "what did he want?"

"That stain on Jacobson's jacket?"

"Yeah?"

"Ammonium nitrate."

Steve stopped walking. "Ammonium nitrate? The explosive you find in fertilizer?"

"Among other things, yes. Charlie has a very interesting idea of what it was doing there."

The Navy vet frowned. "Hit me with it."

"He thinks someone slipped a miniscule amount of ammonium nitrate into your pocket. Or, rather, Jacobson's pocket. It's a white powder so if Jacobson noticed it he'd probably just think it was detergent residue. Now, you and I think of ammonium nitrate first as being an explosive, but it does have other properties. One of those is that it absorbs water. In fact, in humid conditions-like, say, summer in Hawaii with a storm moving in-it can absorb enough water to liquify. Liquid ammonium nitrate is highly endothermic."

"Highly endothermic..." Steve repeated. "That's right! It's used in chemical cold packs."

"You're at the bar wearing Jacobson's jacket with a cold patch on your pocket."

"So the device Carpenter was given," Steve was following the reasoning, "could have been an infrared camera with a filter to control the heat range it registered. If it only registered cold, we'd have all been a bunch of shadowy figures, but I'd have had a blue spot-a light-on my pocket."

"Marking you as Jacobson and singling you out for a little something extra in your beer," Danny concluded. His voice changed. "Ouch," he said, sounding faint. "Uh oh. That's not good."

"What's not good? What's happening? Danny? Hey! Danny! Answer me!"

There was a clattering sound, such as a phone might make when it was dropped on concrete. Steve could hear screams and shouts in the background, accompanied by the thud of a falling body. A loud buzz, like a giant insect, started off faint, grew so loud that he could almost feel the vibration through the phone, and then faded away. The line stayed open, but Danny didn't speak again.