by G M Eppers
Everyone looked at me like I’d sprouted horns. “Excuse me?” said Billings, speaking for everybody.
I stretched and yawned, fatigue coming on me rather suddenly. “The assistant chef isn’t the only possibility here. I think we should look into the warehouse. This could be retaliation for an Uber confiscation. If they recently took in a pile of Uber from one particular source, it probably pissed off someone big time.” Every Chembassy had a warehouse where they stored and incinerated collected Uber. Most of their Uber would be voluntarily surrendered, but some would have been deposited from law enforcement busts from all over the country. I had already looked into it, and the warehouse in question was a chess knight’s move away, two blocks up and one block over. We wouldn’t even need a cab.
“What if the fire was a diversion?” Speculated Sylvia. “Maybe they’ve already broken into the warehouse and cleaned it out while everyone has been fussing over the Chembassy.”
“Are you up for breaking into the warehouse in the middle of night?” I asked. There were no takers. We could get arrested, and then we couldn’t solve anything. “While we’re all getting ready for bed, put on the news. They probably have security guards posted. If anything happened at the warehouse today, it should be plastered all over the airwaves.”
It took about half an hour to decide who was going to sleep where, and another half an hour for everyone to get ready for bed. There was nothing on the news about a break-in at the Chembassy warehouse, so we decided to rest up and tackle it tomorrow. We’d shared accommodations before, even in close quarters like this. Aside from the occasional elbow jab to quiet a snorer, we got along pretty well.
The next morning, after a free continental breakfast supplied by the hotel, we headed over to the warehouse. We got some stares as we paraded down the street. We had our side arms and stun guns and walkie talkies, but had left the helmets in the hotel rooms. We weren’t expecting any trouble, but I’d learned my lesson in London. We’d been there to visit what we thought was a sick friend and arrived with no weaponry or gear of any kind, only to discover that the illness was a ruse and he was being held captive by an Uber dealer named Rennet Butler. Butler had two high capacity handguns and we had jack. We were lucky to escape without serious injury. I wouldn’t be taking my team in anywhere from now on without basic defensive hardware. Of course, it wasn’t entirely our hardware that got the stares, but also Sylvia’s eye patch and the twins, not to mention being a party of eight. And Roxy’s inappropriate outfit of the day, which was a seafoam green dress with a pleated skirt covered with felted filigree. At least she didn’t have a train on the thing. It still looked like she’d taken a wrong turn at a red carpet somewhere.
We joined a young girl at a corner as we waited for the light to change. She appeared to be about ten, with brown eyes and hair, and she was wearing torn jeans and a long-sleeved, but lightweight pink sweater. The girl was curious but well trained. She tried to keep her eyes straight ahead, watching the light, but they kept wandering back to us on the sly. I smiled. “It’s okay,” I said, not sure if she would understand us. “We know we’re strange.”
“Where are you from?” She asked. Her English was quite good, with only a slight accent.
“We’re from America. We work for CURDS. Do you know about CURDS?” She nodded. “We’re here to investigate the explosion at the Chembassy.” I expected her to comment on the explosion, but she seemed to ignore what I’d said as if it was already old news.
“Are you going to take our cheese away?”
“Only if it’s Uber. Uber is bad for you.”
“That’s not what my brother says.” She looked up to check the light, but it hadn’t changed yet. “He says Uber is flavor. He learned it on WHEYTV. We watch WHEYTV every day. They have WHEYToons.”
That scared me. What the H-E-Double Toothpicks was WHEYTV? And was WHEY really broadcasting dangerous lies like that? They were going to start a whole new OOPS and it could easily cost this little girl her life. I crouched down to meet her face to face. I didn’t have to crouch very far. “Listen, Uber really is bad. Your brother is wrong. If you care about him, you won’t let him eat any. And you shouldn’t eat any, either.”
She shrugged. “Mom won’t buy any cheese. My brother says she’s chickenshit.” She slapped a hand over her mouth and looked guilty, then removed it slowly. “I’m not supposed to say chickenshit. It’s a bad word.”
I stood again. The light was about to change. “You’re right about that. And your Mom is right about the cheese. Especially if it’s not marked by CURDS.” I put a gentle hand on her shoulder. “Promise me you won’t eat any cheese that wasn’t okayed by CURDS.” I was pretty forceful. I really wanted her promise, even though I’d probably never see her again and would never know if she kept it.
I looked her right in the eyes and she looked at me, and put her hand over mine on her shoulder. “Okay. But can I keep watching WHEYToons? They’re funny!”
The light changed, but she stayed with us as we all crossed. I didn’t have any basis for recommending or discouraging WHEYToons, so even though I wanted to tell her to stay away from them, I was afraid that would only have the opposite effect. “Sure. But remember they’re cartoons and not textbooks. If you want to find out about Uber or cheeses, go to the library and read about it in books. And make sure the books aren’t published by WHEY, either. Anyone else, but not WHEY. You understand?”
She stopped on the opposite curb and thought about it for a moment as my team gathered around to hear. She glanced around at all the faces, filled with gentle, friendly smiles. “Yes. It would be . . .” she searched for the English word, and finally found it, “. . . prejudicial?” She said it slowly, each syllable virtually a word of its own. Then she added the Czech word as if to verify it to herself.
Badger got a huge grin on his face. “That’s exactly right! You’re way too smart for WHEYTV. You should try something else.” He winked at me over her head.
She beamed with pride, then waved and turned down the block. We stayed at the corner to cross the other street as well to get to the Chembassy warehouse.
It was another reused building. In this case, it had been, fittingly, a crematorium. Before it was a crematorium, it was a medical building that used the big ovens in the basement to dispose of amputated limbs back in the day. So the incinerator was already there, saving CURDS a boatload of money. There was no security guard at the door, as I had expected, but it was locked. Possibly whatever guards they had on hand had been recruited to help with the police work connected with the bombing. When I said I didn’t want to break in to the warehouse in the middle of the night, the operative phrase was ‘in the middle of the night.’ We stood around blocking Badger from sight as he jimmied the lock, then filed in quickly and closed the door behind us. Badger flipped on the lights. What had been the lobby of the crematory was now a storage area. Wooden crates and cardboard boxes were stacked around the perimeter, each one with a large rectangular label on the exposed side. The labels identified the cheese. We saw some mondseer, urda, trappista, and abertam, all cheeses of the European region. The labels also marked it as Uber, and showed a date of acquisition and a code number that represented the law enforcement incident or donation source. In addition, each container was stamped ‘Dangerous’ and ‘Do Not Consume’ in large red letters. Blue metal dollies were propped up here and there, and piles of straps and bungees were scattered over the stacks.
Badger was already carefully recording as many labels as he could with his smart phone. “We won’t be able to identify the source for these acquisitions without some kind of reference material,” he said. “I bet there’s a code book of some kind somewhere, but they’d keep it separate from the storage, to avoid exactly what we’re doing. There’s probably also either a log book, or a computer system with electronic copies, and possibly both.”
“Okay,” I said, “we’ll split up. There are two whole floors of offices upstairs, and the incinerator room dow
nstairs. Badger, you stay here and keep recording. Notify us if anyone comes in or if you happen to decipher a code or something. Billings, you and Roxy go down, the rest of us will work our way up. Call on the walkie if you find something.” I could tell Billings was disappointed that I didn’t assign the twins with him this time. I liked to mix people up, though. And I didn’t want Billings and Avis to get too used to being together. They couldn’t just assume that I’d pair them up, and I needed to make sure they would take assignments without complaint like professionals. After the initial disappointment, Billings did fine. He tagged Roxy and they fell in together, going through the door into the stairwell and disappearing down the steps. The rest of us headed upstairs to the second floor. I directed Nitro and Sylvia to take this floor, and had Sir Haughty and the twins follow me to the third floor.
Each floor held a maze of offices rivaling those at the crime scene unit, but built out of regular opaque walls rather than the clear plexiglass. I’m not sure which is easier to navigate because even though you can see through plexiglass you also can’t initially see turns or identify separate rooms. Whereas with opaque walls, you can’t see around corners or what might be coming at you from another room. But we were only looking for an inanimate object. We weren’t expecting to find someone hiding around every corner and we didn’t have to use the hand guns to clear a room before entering. We didn’t have to creep. If it had been a situation like that, I never would have gone off on my own. It would have been teams of two and an entirely different arrangement of personnel. Guns would have been drawn and other precautions taken. Perhaps the lack of a security guard should have tipped me off, but it hadn’t. My bad.
On the third floor, I admired the view. I could see the devastation a couple of blocks away. It looked lonely and abandoned now. All the firemen and emergency responders had left long ago. And I thought briefly of the plastic tented numbers and the void in the ash, and remembered Chembassador Philips. Silently, I promised him we’d find out who did it and bring them to justice. The only window on the floor, which I noticed from outside, was here in the entry way. The top floor of the building was virtually windowless, and I was curious. Not as curious as Sir Haughty and the twins, who were waiting for instructions as we stood just inside the stairwell door. There was a hallway straight ahead which branched left and right. I sent Sir Haughty to the right, which had one row of doors and a bank of elevators, and took the twins with me to the left, which had doors on both sides. The twins took the east rooms and I took the west.
All the doors on my side of the hall were marked “Výslech” and numbered 1, 2, and 3. I had no idea what “Výslech” meant. I could have called Badger on the walkie and asked, but what it meant didn’t seem very important. A room is a room is a room. I went into the first one. It was bare except for a simple table with a chair on each side, and a large mirror on the wall. Výslech 2 was the same. Výslech 3, at the end of the hall, was also labeled “Pozorování.” This room was larger and seemed more promising. There was a desk and a file cabinet on one side, and large panel interior windows. One looked into the room I’d just left, and the other looked into the room on the other side of the hall. I could see the twins just entering, and waved at them. They looked up at me, but didn’t return the wave.
Suddenly, I was grabbed from behind, and a cloth was placed over my mouth and nose. I don’t even remember falling.
Ex or Spies
Chapter One
I woke up suddenly, still feeling the panic of being attacked from behind as if the adrenalin my body produced had been stored in a little pocket waiting for consciousness to release it. I sprang up into a sitting position, hearing the squeak of leatherette cushions from the overstuffed couch beneath me. No sooner was I partially vertical than the world started spinning, and I had to stop and put my head between my knees.
“Slowly, Helena,” said a familiar voice. “Xenon is easier to recover from than chloroform or other anesthetics but it’s not like waking up in the morning. Breathe.”
I sat up slowly and looked around, taking a deep breath. I was in a small office. The door was closed. Aside from the couch, there were two chairs. A simple armless, straight backed chair was a couple feet in front of the couch. A better chair was behind the cherrywood desk and Miss Chiff was sitting in it. The desk had a phone, a blotter, and a couple of folders on it, as well as Miss Chiff’s familiar laptop, which was open in front of her. In the corner was a rubber tree plant, and behind her a clean whiteboard. I didn’t know if I was still in Kutna Hora or even still in the Czech Republic. I could be in Timbuktu for all I knew. “Miss Chiff,” I said, trying out my voice. It seemed fine and I quickly gained both confidence and ire. “You kidnapped me!” I rose carefully and moved toward the chair facing her desk, feeling more myself with every passing second. I didn’t even sit down. Fury was rising. “We’re in the middle of an investigation and you take me away from my team? They’ll come looking for me. They’ll drop everything and come looking. You’re compromising the investigation!” I wasn’t steady yet, but I stood in front of the desk ignoring the chair for the time being, propping myself up with the palms of my hands.
“Calm down, Helena. I did this for a reason.” She looked at me through her half-rimmed glasses. “Your team is fine. They don’t even know you’re gone yet.”
“The twins were right there!”
“They saw nothing.”
I thought a moment, my head and memory still a bit cloudy from the anesthesia. The rooms. They’d been interrogation rooms. And the windows were one-way windows for observation. Of course! I’d barely had time to process the visual before being knocked out. The twins had been looking at the mirror when I had waved at them. That’s why they didn’t wave back. I licked my dry lips. “But the room was empty. Where --?”
Miss Chiff produced a bottle of Dasani and pushed it across the desk. “We created a false wall to hide the extraction team. Really, Helena, you must learn not to be so inquisitive about things which matter so little. How I perform my job should not be your worry.”
I opened the bottle and quickly drank half. “But how could you know which room I would be searching? I just --” Like many things Miss Chiff did, this was a mystery. And it was a mystery she refused to solve for me. I guessed that she had simply installed an ‘extraction team’ in several rooms, based on the expected search pattern, and I wondered if anyone else would encounter them. I worried about my team. It wouldn’t be long before they realized I was missing. With so many people searching the warehouse, a complete sweep wouldn’t take more than half an hour. If Miss Chiff was right that my team didn’t know I was missing, at least I couldn’t be in Timbuktu. I must not have been unconscious very long and I was undoubtedly still in Kutna Hora, possibly still in the warehouse. My hands went to my hips, and I found that my walkie and cell phone had been removed. I still had the side arm and stun gun, however. She wanted me incommunicado, not helpless. And she clearly wasn’t concerned that I’d try to escape. I’d known Miss Chiff long enough to realize that a move like that would be completely foolish. She probably did have guards outside the door. And she undoubtedly had the same combat training we did, though she probably didn’t have to use it as often.
“We don’t have time to dissect the entire operation. There’s something you need to see.” She stood, and reached above her shoulders to hook a finger into a plastic ring. She pulled it down, revealing a schoolroom map of Europe. There was a circular red sticker in the middle of the Czech Republic. And another in The Netherlands, and Belgium, three in Germany and one that obliterated Luxembourg.
My jaw dropped and I sank into the chair against my will. She waited while I absorbed what I was seeing. The circles were, I was assuming, more bombings. The Czech Republic was not the only one. And I had no doubt that each was a Chembassy, the main protection against the Uber threat. “My God,” I said, breathless as I stared at the map. “How long has this been going on? How have you kept it out of the news?”
“It’s only been two weeks since the first bombing, in The Netherlands. We managed to keep it out of the mainstream media and off the front pages by calling in several favors with our press connections, and only because the damage was limited to the buildings and minor injuries of support staff. This one is the first to include fatalities. We won’t be able to keep it under wraps any longer. We were hoping to avoid a worldwide panic, but it’s gone too far. This killed a Chembassador, which makes it an assassination.” She paused a moment. “Was Sir Haughty able to see him?”
“Yes. Thank you for asking,” I said from somewhere above my head. “Sir Haughty said goodbye and Philips said ‘meatballs.’ I’m not sure—“ I was going to say that I wasn’t sure the Chembassador was aware of Sir Haughty’s presence, but Miss Chiff interrupted me.
“Meatballs?” She pulled her laptop closer and started pounding keys. “Did you say meatballs?”
“Yes. It’s what the chef was fixing for dinner. Apparently they are his favorite dish.” I waved the comment away like an annoying gnat.
Her eyes scanned her laptop screen. She pushed more buttons and examined the screen again. “Helena, you may have just given us the how, though I’m not entirely sure.”
“What do you mean?”
She checked a few more pages just to make sure, then explained, “Every Chembassy attack has happened shortly before dinnertime, and each one had meatballs on the menu. The chefs were most often the casualties, as well. Why didn’t we see it?”
“Because there’s no evidence of exploding meatballs?” I was skeptical of the idea. How could you possibly make meatballs explode with that kind of force?
“But there wouldn’t be, Helena. Whatever was in the oven would have been completely incinerated. How diabolical.” She closed the laptop as if the problem were solved. “I’ll get people on it. But that’s not why you are here. You’re here to help us deal with the bigger picture. The deliberate endangerment of Uber containment. The escalation of financial resources toward that end, and somehow controlling the dissemination of misinformation to the public at large.”
