Where is Home? A Futuristic Thriller/Romance

By Sandy Raschke

They met in the First Class Lounge at LaGuardia airport. Three days later he flew to Chicago to show her the sights; that night they became lovers. They had nothing in common: Aldis Morgenna, a bodyguard, had recently retired on a small pension; Kiera Hunt, an heiress, was a well-respected Swiss private investigator, and yet she trusted him to keep her innermost secret, as they felt destined for each other.

He accompanied her to Luzern, Switzerland, where Kiera's former legal guardian, Louis Schweitzer, had suffered a stroke, and stayed to console and support her after his death. When she left the next morning to help Schweitzer's family plan his funeral, she didn't link to Aldis as planned. He contacted Schweitzer's sons. They linked to a family friend, a local police inspector, who pinged her handheld device and tracked her to a warehouse, where Aldis and the inspector found her severely beaten by two officers of The Consortium, a global pharmaceutical giant, as revenge for losing a lawsuit to one of her clients.

Hounded by the media, Aldis suggested they retreat to his cottage on California's Monterey coast where Kiera could relax and recover from her injuries. They made plans to tour North America, but their vacation ended in Las Vegas. At a local jazz club, they encountered Frank Hanley, a Las Vegas police detective; he had seen the tabloids and knew about Kiera, and he and Aldis had crossed paths decades ago, when Aldis was a bouncer at the club. He asked for their help in solving the grotesque murder of an eccentric genius inventor of advanced AI humanoid women. Hired as temporary consultants to the LVPD, they found the murderers within a week—but that was only the beginning of what was to come.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Sandy Raschke
• Release date: Oct 4, 2019
• ISBN: 9781393761259

Book preview

Chapter 1

He was sitting at the bar nursing a glass of ginger ale when he saw her enter the La Guardia Airport First Class lounge. Instant attraction . She was tall—he estimated a little over six feet—lithe, her raven black hair in a twist at the nape of her neck. She had pierced ears with stud earrings that he guessed were sapphires. She was dressed conservatively in black slacks and a silky white blouse, covered by a cutaway black jacket. On her feet were black clogs, which didn’t match her business attire. But it wasn’t the clothes he found interesting—it was her face—not quite oval, with a high forehead and skin that seemed to glow. And those lips—full and enticing. She looked in his direction and he saw her eyes—a dull brown. Couldn’t be —maybe she was wearing lenses. He wondered what was behind them.

She sat down in an easy chair away from the bar. He couldn’t take his eyes off her. It was 1030 hours; he had a flight to catch in ten minutes and knew he was going to miss it. He was forty-five years old and had never approached a woman before—they usually solicited him. He took a deep breath and went over to her.

She was looking at her handheld and gazed up at him as he bent over slightly and held out his hand. She gave it a strong shake.

Aldis Morgenna, he said. Would you care for a drink or something to eat?

No thank you, she said, in a slight accent that he couldn’t place—maybe German or Eastern European. I don’t drink before a flight and already ate onboard the flight from Zurich.

Do you mind if I sit with you? he asked. I just missed my flight. I need to book another.

Sorry to hear that. She patted the chair next to her. Please sit. Make yourself comfortable.

He sat down. Passing through, or do you have business in North America? he asked.

"I’m on my way to Chi—cog—oh...if that is how it is pronounced, she said. I tried to get a non-stop out of Zurich but the flight was fully booked, so I’ve got a connecting flight in twenty minutes."

He nodded. Your first time here?

Yes.

From where? he asked.

"Luzern, Switzerland," she said and didn’t go on to elaborate.

What brings you here?

Business. She got out her card and handed it to him.

Hunt Investigations, Security and Risk Management, he said. Kiera Hunt?

She nodded. And why are you here, Mr. Morgenna?

Aldis. He got out his card and ID. I’m a personal security agent, on my way to pick up a client in Denver. I’ll be escorting him to a business conference in Seattle.

You are a bodyguard then, she said.

More like a nanny at times.

She laughed. I can see that.

Her flight was called. As they stood up, he spotted a man sitting across from her, holding up his handheld. He was trying to take a photo. Aldis blocked him. Nice to meet you...Aldis, she said. Perhaps we will meet again some day.

Wait, he said in a low voice. I’ll escort you onto the plane.

Why?

Someone just tried to take your photo. Any idea who might be following you? She shook her head. He gently gripped her elbow and walked with her down the corridor to the ramp. He showed his ID to the AI humanoid flight attendant and was let through. He accompanied her onto the plane and into the first class cabin.

That was a surprise, she said. "Danke...I mean thank you." 

I’ll contact you when you get to Chicago and make sure you’re okay, he said, looking at the link on her card.  

He turned to go back to the lounge and saw the man running toward him. He blocked his way.

What the hell are you doing? I have a plane to catch.

Why did you try to take a photo of that young woman? he asked in a gruff voice. At six-feet-six inches tall and 270 pounds of mostly muscle, he towered over the man and assumed a stance to deliberately intimidate him.

I didn’t try to do anything, the man said. Now get out of the way.

In a minute, Aldis said, as he heard the cabin door close.

The jet soon pulled away from the ramp. Now you can go.

Asshole, the man said as he turned around and headed out of the airport.

Aldis smirked then followed him at a discreet distance. The guy wasn’t re-booking his flight; he sprinted passed the ticket counter and out of the terminal.

The man waved and a limo with blacked-out windows pulled up to the curb. The back window rolled down and Aldis heard him angrily say, She got away, before the window rolled back up and the limo drove off without him.

Chapter 2

Kiera Hunt leaned back in her seat and made sure the seatbelt was fastened tightly. She was a white-knuckle flyer and the only comfort for her now was that the flight to Chicago would be short, slightly less than thirty minutes. She looked at the card that Aldis Morgenna had given her. He was employed by Thompson Security. He was a handsome man, tall with a good physique, not brawny but well proportioned. His bright blue eyes seemed kind and his demeanor, protective, his voice, commanding in a soft way. When they shook hands, she felt an immediate attraction.

He seemed serious when he said she was being followed. By whom, she wondered? Should she link to him when she landed? Or let him contact her first as he had said? She wasn’t used to such attention, but she did want to see him again. No, she wouldn’t link to him first; it would be inappropriate. She would wait for him to link to her. And if he didn’t?  She had a project to complete and would deal with that later.

Chapter 3

Within an hour, Aldis was on another flight from New York to Denver. When he landed, the driverless cab he summoned pulled up to the curb and he got in. He keyed in the address and sat back. Fifteen minutes later, the cab stopped in front of the client’s hotel, a fifteen-story edifice that reeked of opulence. A humanoid attendant opened the door and Aldis got out.

If the client was anything like the one he had escorted a few months ago, who had ordered him around as if he were a utility humanoid, Aldis was prepared to submit his resignation to the home office of Thompson and Associates Security and take early retirement. He had been with them almost twenty years and had been passed over several times for a management position. Not that he actually wanted to stay inside and do paperwork, but he was good at his job and had never been recognized for it, especially after he had prevented a number of high-profile business executives from getting kidnapped or assaulted.

He had already calculated how much he would receive from his pension—barely enough to live on—but he had a home to return to, savings, and that and his meager pension would have to do until he could find something else—something more exciting, with more substance, something that didn’t bore him out of his mind.

He kept thinking of Kiera Hunt and wondered what she was doing, if she had made it to Chicago without incident. He had her link and would contact her when he got to his room in Seattle. After he was done with the conference there, he had three days off and perhaps they could get together under more pleasant circumstances.

He went into the lobby, gave the humanoid desk clerk his name and the name of his client. A humanoid assistant took him up to the room. Aldis knocked and Carlton DaVini, the CFO of Atavik Pharmaceuticals opened the door.

You’re late, he said through clenched teeth.

Aldis smelled alcohol on his breath. Missed the flight, he replied. I had some business to take care of and it took longer than I thought.

Should have notified me.

Aldis nodded. Yes, I apologize. I was scrambling to find another flight out.

I was about to contact Thompson and tell them you were a no-show.

I’m here now, barely an hour late. You have two hours before the flight departs, Aldis said. Shall we go?

Looking at Aldis with disdain, DaVini handed him his carry-on and two heavy suitcases. He said he’d been on the road for a week and wasn’t looking forward to the conference. He just wanted to go home.

Aldis linked to the nearest transportation company and by the time they left the lobby, a limousine and humanoid driver were waiting for them at the hotel’s entrance. He let Glenn, the humanoid, take the bags and put them in the trunk. Aldis opened the back seat door for DaVini then got in the front.

The exec turned out to be similar to the last client he had. If he wasn’t criticizing the traffic or the accommodations at the hotel (which had a five-star rating), he was berating him for something. When they got to the air and spaceport terminal in Denver, the limo driver dropped them off and Aldis escorted DaVini to the first class lounge; he checked their bags and returned. DaVini had knocked back two shots of bourbon and had mellowed out a bit.

But not enough. Their flight was late, which set DaVini off again. As they sat in the lounge, he told Aldis to get him another drink, which he did. Forty-five minutes later, a sullen, inebriated Carlton DaVini had to be assisted onto the plane.

Within minutes, the man fell asleep and Aldis decided not to wait until they landed in Seattle, and linked to Kiera Hunt.

I’m fine, she said. I’m at my client’s office, but staying at a hotel downtown near the law firm. Should be here for at least three days.

I’d like to visit before you go. Take you out to dinner and show you the city, he said.

I’d enjoy that—and seeing you again, she said. Need to go. We’re having a meeting on the new security system. Talk to you later. She terminated the link.

Aldis leaned back and sipped a beer. He looked at the sleeping DaVini, the narrow ribbon of saliva dripping from his mouth, and formed a letter of resignation in his mind.

Two unpleasant days with DaVini in Seattle solidified Aldis’ resolve. After the conference banquet, which ended at 2200 hours, he took the exec back to his hotel room and told him he had arranged for a wake-up call at o700 hours so the man could make his 0830 flight home. DaVini waved, muttered a few expletives and told Aldis to go.

When Aldis got back to his hotel room, he used the voice recognition system on his handheld to write his letter of resignation. By 0800 hours, he was escorting DaVini to the first class lounge. DaVini complained about his hangover then ordered Aldis to get him another shot of bourbon. A few minutes later, another Thompson agent arrived to accompany DaVini home. They gave each other knowing glances, then Aldis hit the Send button.

Chapter 4

Kiera Hunt’s client , Coburg and Delany, a law firm that had business interests in Germany and Switzerland, had paid for her travel and accommodations. They had hired her to analyze and update their security system and do a risk assessment of the various business interests they held in North America and Europe.

Although the firm had provided her with first class accommodations, Kiera wasn’t used to traveling great distances. Flying made her nervous. She preferred trains, taxis, the coziness of her office and apartment in Luzern, and the familiarity of living in quiet surroundings.

She had grown used to that comfort, thanks to her former legal guardian, Lt. Commander Louis Schweitzer (Ret.). He was her mentor, a straight-talking man, and had never withheld anything from her in the twenty-two years she had lived with him. She vaguely remembered her trip from Mars to Earth and to his villa outside of Luzern—she was almost five years old, an orphan, fearful, and he had welcomed her with open arms.

When she was ten, he told her she had been born in 2162, on Europa, Jupiter’s third moon—and if Jake Allen Hunt, her father, hadn’t taken quick action to have the surviving members of his crew take her along with them to Mars, she could have perished if the ten surviving alien colonists had taken her instead.

Her father had been a billionaire currency trader. He had never married. He used his wealth to help finance deep space exploration, partnering with a number of other billionaires throughout North America and Europe; he had degrees in engineering and astrophysics and, she was told, had been a welcome addition to the crew of seven men and five women, who had volunteered the next five years of their lives to explore the outer planets.

In 2160, after traveling through space for four years, using newly developed proton propulsion, the explorers discovered a colony on Europa, consisting of three small domes. They decided to land and assess the situation.

What they found, according to Louis Schweitzer, was a group of one hundred beings that called themselves the Sojourners, an alien species with physical characteristics similar to humans. They had settled on Europa in order to tame it into a habitable environment and reap any resources they found there.

Inside the domes, the atmosphere was thin but breathable, and Jake Hunt and the others were invited into the humble dwellings of the colonists, where they did their best to communicate with what turned out to be intelligent life forms. Within six months, using sign language and then teaching each other basic words, they were able to converse in a kind of a hybrid patois.

Jake’s notes revealed the Sojourners were friendly, hospitable and generous. But they kept their origins to themselves and did not reveal how long they had been on Europa.

They were also handsome, beguiling beings and within months, half of the crew broke their established code of ethics and coupled with their hosts. Jake Hunt was among them.

In 2162, his translator and lover, Anaya, produced a female child, and Kiera seemed to have inherited the best of both of them: outwardly she looked human and very much like her father, except for the color of her eyes—sapphire blue with golden flecks. Internally, her physiology was mostly human but also alien, according to the Sojourner physician who scanned her organs when she was born and again when she was a year old.

As Kiera grew older, Louis Schweitzer told her a more complete story of what had happened to her father and the others: Three years after her birth, a virus raced through one of the colonies and spread quickly throughout the others; although a quarantine prohibiting travel between the three domed communities was imposed, the virus kept spreading. The word sabotage was bandied about, but no one could find the culprit. Half of the population died within the first month. Most of the Sojourners were ill and, although a number of them were scientists and physicians, their limited resources prohibited them from finding a cure.   

Jake and the four surviving crew members, three men and a woman, voted to leave Europa and go back to Mars, their slingshot into deep space, where several colonies had been established over the last 100 years.

Kiera was the only child not infected, out of the four born to the explorers and their lovers. All eight of the Sojourners’ children had died. Then Jake and Anaya suddenly became ill and forty-eight hours before lift-off, they too were gone. Kiera appeared to be immune.

The colonization of Europa was abandoned, as the ten surviving Sojourners boarded their ship and disappeared into deep space.

Chapter 5

On his deathbed, Jake gave the pilot two handhelds: one contained his notes and journals, a codicil to his will, and instructions about Kiera’s care—the other his personal contacts. When the crew landed on Mars in 2166, after a year in stasis, they took an oath not to reveal anything about the Sojourners, or their liaisons with them. They wanted to shelter Kiera from government scrutiny and concocted a story that her mother was one of the four female crew members who had died from an unknown strain of virus, picked up during their exploration of an asteroid, along with her father and the others.

They spent a month in quarantine before being allowed to disembark. The pilot gave the Governor of the Mars Administrator’s Colony Jake’s letter that he had transferred to his own handheld device. The Governor linked to former astronaut Lt. Commander Louis Schweitzer (Ret.) on Earth and told him what happened. He repeated the crew’s story of Kiera’s origins, and added that the mother had no family that Kiera could be placed with. He then asked if Schweitzer would be willing to honor Jake’s last wish and become Kiera’s legal guardian.

The sole surviving female crew member escorted Kiera to Earth and took her to meet Louis Schweitzer at his villa. She gave him Jake Hunt’s handheld and journal. Six months had passed since he had agreed to take the now five-year old orphan into his home. They were formally introduced then the former crew member took her leave.

Schweitzer knew before the woman gave him Jack’s personal effects that Kiera’s birth mother was an alien, as the pilot had electronically transmitted Jake’s journals from Mars. Louis was struck by Kiera’s beauty and her resemblance to his old friend and vowed never to tell anyone about her origins, including his two adult sons, Pietor and Timothie, then in their early to mid-twenties.  

From age five to twelve, AI humanoid nannies and tutors took care of Kiera’s basic needs and education. When she turned thirteen, Schweitzer sent her to an exclusive boarding school and, during vacations or on holidays, he took her on train trips across Europe. He included her in all family activities.

Although he treated her as if she were his daughter, he made sure she never forgot who her birth father was, and kept photos and the records of Jake’s adventures for her to look at and listen to. Schweitzer answered all of her questions and told her about his decades-long friendship with Jake.

When she graduated from boarding school, he made arrangements for her to attend Freiberg, a top university in Germany.

She was twenty years old when he told her that Jake had established a trust before he left, to be distributed to his progeny when they came of age, even though he was not married and had no children at the time. But in the codicil, Jake recognized Kiera as his daughter.

The trust instrument stated that when she turned twenty-one, she could choose to receive an annual income from the trust, and the corpus at the end of twenty years, or take regular installments over the next twenty years, upon which the trust would be terminated. Kiera chose the installments. The corpus at the time was one quarter of his estate—or approximately 250 million Swiss francs. The rest, administered by Louis Schweitzer, went to various charities specified in the will, a trust for future astronauts, and a large endowment to Jake’s alma mater, MIT.

Schweitzer’s guardianship ended when Kiera turned twenty-one, but he invited her to stay at the villa as long as she wanted. She told him that when she reached a point where she could support herself independent of her inheritance, she would move out.

She delayed drawing the money for two years after she graduated from Freiburg. She chose to get some business experience first and had worked at a private investment bank as a security and risk analyst for a few years before starting her own firm.

She used 750,000 Swiss francs from the first installment of 2.5 million Swiss francs to set up her security and risk assessment consulting business, and 500,000 Swiss francs of the second installment to keep it afloat. The rest Louis Schweitzer invested for her. After the third year, she had developed a reputation for being an efficient and professional investigator and risk analyst, and her client base expanded to the point where she no longer needed to use the funds.

After she received the fourth installment, she decided to give most of the money away every year—about eighty percent of it—to several hospitals in Luzern and other international charities. Then she established an endowment in her father’s memory at Freiburg, for graduate students studying any of the space sciences.

Louie Schweitzer suggested she invest the remaining twenty percent of each installment, and found her a good investment manager. She was twenty-seven years old when one of his sons offered her his apartment at a bargain sales price. By the time she was thirty-two, she had become a very wealthy woman in her own right.

Chapter 6

At 1100 hours, Aldis Morgenna was sitting in the offices of the Thompson Agency, waiting to speak to the head of human resources. He had arrived a half hour early and rather than waste his time staring at the walls, he decided to link to Kiera Hunt. The screen opened to a smiling face—with very little makeup, and, just as he thought, her eyes weren’t brown, but sapphire blue with mesmerizing golden flecks. Her raven black hair was loose and framed her face in ringlets. He asked if she was finished with her project.

Yes, Aldis, I just sent them my invoice and will be going home soon.

In about an hour I will be a retired bodyguard, he said. I’m in New York again, doing an exit interview. But before I return to Monterey on the west coast, where I have a small cottage near the beach, I just wanted to make sure you’d be free. His heart pounded as he waited for her answer.

She gave him a dazzling smile. Congratulations on your retirement. As I said before, I’d welcome your company. Other than my clients, I don’t know anyone here. He hadn’t noticed it before, but as she continued speaking, her Swiss accent became more pronounced. Unlike Luzern, where I have my home and office, Chicago is a little intimidating. I am not used to towering buildings and crowds of people. Maybe you can show me the sights.

It would be my pleasure, he said, and asked where she was staying.

Business completed, the retirement packet now transferred to his handheld, he booked the next flight to Chicago. Onboard, he looked into skip-tracing, a form of debt collection, as a means to supplement his retirement income. His real desire was to become a private investigator, but that required additional education and a license. Maybe Kiera Hunt could give him a few tips.

Shortly after 1400 hours, he arrived at the same hotel