by Gini Koch
“Huh.” Jeff didn’t seem to think this was too big a deal. “I wasn’t trying to be exclusive with the location, baby. It was just close and convenient.”
Kevin was along for this ride, and he flashed the P.T.C.U. badge. “Let’s remember, gentlemen, that you’re meeting with a Federal agent and act accordingly.” Ishmael and his gang all nodded.
“Richard,” Reader said, “I’d like you in the limo with Paul.” He didn’t make it sound like a request.
White sighed. “Fun while it lasted, Missus Martini. I’m complying, James, no need to look so distressed.” White got into the limo with Gower, though he left the door open so they could both see and hear what was going on.
Chuckie took a long look at Ishmael. “I want all the disguises off, and I want them off now.” His tone clearly indicated arguing would be a bad idea. Reader and Tim were flanking him, and the looks on their faces shared that they agreed with Chuckie and would be happy to help him kick some serious K-9 butt if said order was ignored.
Ishmael nodded, and he and the others removed their rather lame disguises. Once off, they all looked like regular guys in their twenties and thirties. I could see the cop in all of them, though. There was something about the way they stood, the aura of authority they radiated, not to mention the cop haircuts.
I noted all the dogs were sniffing intently. I looked where they were focused—it was the area where I’d spotted the bullet casings.
Chuckie looked long and hard at Ishmael and a few of the others. “Do you know why they were avoiding you?” I asked.
He nodded, as he pointed to Ishmael and the ones I identified as Curly and Larry. “They were part of the police team that came to my apartment a few months ago when it was…ransacked.” I presumed he meant when it was trashed during Operation Confusion, but I kept that to myself.
“We were sent there,” Ishmael said.
“Why were K-9 units at an attempted robbery?” Jeff asked quickly, presumably because he didn’t think I was smart enough to not give things away.
Ishmael shrugged. “We’d gotten a tip that it was a drug deal gone bad.”
Chuckie nodded. “Typical frame setup.” He gave me a pointed look. “It didn’t work.” I got the hint. I was to shut up and not share why I thought it hadn’t worked. It was an easy guess—Chuckie, likely with assistance from the Gower girls, had found and removed anything planted before any local law enforcement had shown up.
“Yeah, well, the hell you caused us for that made it pretty clear we were close to blowing your cover.” Ishmael didn’t sound too sorry about that. Prince was straining at his lead, but Ishmael held him pretty firmly.
“Illegal search and seizure isn’t good for anyone’s record,” Chuckie replied. “You might want to remember that.”
“We’ll take a memo,” Ishmael said in a bored tone of voice.
“Do that,” Kevin said pleasantly. “Kidnapping’s not on the list of things good little boys do, either.”
While they were doing the typical male posturing that seemed to activate whenever one alpha male was in proximity to another, I counted heads. Len and Kyle were leaning against the limo with the current and former Pontifexes in it, and Jerry, Hughes, and Walker were leaning against the second limo. Each limo had its doors open on the sides facing us. All of the men looked very ready to rumble. Counting me, that meant we had nine on our side, eleven if White and Gower got into any fight we might have, which I knew both of them would.
There had been two men and two dogs per taxi. It wasn’t complicated math. So we were evenly matched, if I didn’t count Prince and the rest of his pack. Only, that was wrong. “Officer Moe, where’s your twelfth man and beast?” I asked as Prince yanked hard and pulled out of Ishmael’s grasp. He made a beeline for where I’d spotted the casings and started sniffing around.
Prince started barking his head off. Ishmael ran to his dog, and I followed. I spotted something other than bullet casings. Blood. And lots of it.
CHAPTER 70
THE OTHER DOGS JOINED PRINCE, and everyone crowded around us. “Stop shoving, you’re going to ruin evidence,” Ishmael shouted.
Everyone backed off, the K-9 cops dragging their dogs away. Prince whined, loudly, then threw back his head and howled. The other dogs joined in.
“We have two officers down,” I told Kevin and Chuckie once the men had quieted their dogs. “One human, one canine.”
“We’ll need to run tests to see whose blood this is, Kitty,” Kevin said.
I shook my head and pointed to the dogs. “They already know. You think they were just doing the dog version of a twenty-one gun salute for a stranger?” I looked at Ishmael. “You’ve been too obvious. Someone spotted you following me and Mister Joel Oliver and decided to thin your herd.”
Ishmael and the rest of his guys looked ill. “He wanted to look for clues to what you were doing here yesterday,” the one I thought of as Larry said.
The rest of them started talking, and it was clear they were all freaked, upset, and ready to hit something. Ishmael tried to get them under control, but the dogs weren’t the only ones not listening to commands.
“Shut UP!” Jeff bellowed. Everyone, man and beast, got very silent very quickly. No one bellowed like my husband. Once his voice had stopped echoing, Jeff looked around, eyes narrowed. “I feel for your loss. But right now, there’s a number of bad things going on, and if you’re not going to become part of the solution, then we’re going to arrest you all and let the guys in charge of taking people to Guantanamo sort you out.”
Ishmael’s squad nodded and pulled themselves together. I wasn’t sure how much human speak the dogs understood, but they were all clear that the Leader of the Pack had just laid down the law, and none of them wanted to challenge for dominance. Eleven dogs were sitting at attention, ears alert, ready for action or for doggie treats, depending.
Kevin and Chuckie took down the pertinent information while Reader and Tim called for some agent teams. No reason to involve the D.C. police—apparently the only ones who could make it on time to a crime scene had been laid off and were here with us.
I spent the time handing out teething biscuit doggie treats and pets, which earned me a lot of dog kisses. Ensure the big dogs love you, that was my motto. I discreetly used a baby wipe to clean off the dog slobber.
“So, you want to tell us what’s going on now?” Jeff asked once our teams showed up, all in limos. The A-Cs got out and started doing their thing. The human drivers stayed in the cars. I resisted the impulse to have Jeff and Chuckie do some sort of lie detector test on them—if we couldn’t trust the majority of our human agents, we were screwed anyway. However, I found myself hoping Ishmael was right and that the garage wasn’t going to find a dozen vehicles to be too much for it.
Ishmael and I brought everyone up to speed. “So, you’re all no longer law enforcement,” Kevin said when we were done. “You’re just vigilantes.”
Ishmael shot him a dirty look. “Not my fault we got cut.” He glared at Chuckie. “One too many complaints will do that for you.”
Chuckie shook his head. “Neither I nor anyone in my agency caused your team to be cut.” He had his Conspiracy Hat on, I could tell. “When cutting units, I’d think one of the last any force would cut would be K-9, if only for the dogs’ drug-sniffing ability.”
“Yeah, well, that wasn’t the opinion of the higher-ups,” Ishmael said angrily.
“What were you working on around the time you all got the pink slips?” I asked.
“The usual stuff, running down drug tips, handling some aspects of search and seizure. Nothing extraordinary. His case was the oddest,” Ishmael jerked his head at Chuckie.
“Did you take anything from Chuckie’s place and enter it into evidence?”
The entire squad shook their heads. The one I was thinking of as Curly cocked his head at me. “You think we found something somewhere that made us targets?”
“Yeah, I really do.” I pondered some mo
re. “Were you sent to any high-profile places? Like the White House?”
“I know where you’re going with this,” Larry said. “We’d have to go through case files to determine if we stepped on toes we shouldn’t have, and we don’t have access to those anymore. But, just so you know, regular cops don’t go to the White House.”
“You resisted the desire to break in and plant bugs to track the President? I’m impressed. You just limited yourselves to Embassy Row, so you violated the rights of, what, ten or twenty countries?” The words left my mouth, and Jeff and Chuckie both stared at me. I stared back. “Oh. Snap.”
“What?” Ishmael asked.
“You put surveillance into every Embassy around ours, right?”
He sighed. “Yes. We wanted to know what you were up to.”
“You mean you wanted to know if Mister Joel Oliver was under our protection or in our custody.”
“Yeah, that was part of it.”
“He’ll be gratified to discover that he has a fan club. And then you picked up that we had information on a notorious assassin, and what better way to prove your squad’s worth than to bring down the Dingo, right?”
He grimaced. “Right. You’d have done the same in my place.”
“Possibly. We can debate that at another time. But let me ask the big question. Did you happen to put illegal surveillance into the Paraguayan Embassy?”
“It’s not illegal—” Ishmael started.
“Can it,” Kevin snapped. “I could arrest you on a laundry list of violations, every one of which would hold up in a court of law. You’ve kidnapped an ambassador. The only reason we don’t have all of you in handcuffs is because you did help save said ambassador’s life. Keep on playing coy, and we’ll show you how we do things at the P.T.C.U. Trust me when I say you don’t want to know.”
“Fine,” Ishmael said. “Yes, we went there. We hit every Embassy within a mile radius of yours.”
“And I’ll wager you’ve also been investigating Titan Security, especially their head man, Antony Marling, right?”
Ishmael grimaced. “Yes. There’s not too much to find. Titan’s really good about hiding histories on anyone who matters in the company, Marling especially.”
“Were you working on that before you were cut?” Chuckie asked.
Ishmael sighed. “Not officially.”
“But you were unofficially, in your off hours?” I asked. They all nodded. I looked at Jeff. “We have room.”
He sighed. “I’m getting officially tired of adopting strays.”
“What are you talking about?” Larry asked indignantly. “Our dogs belong to us. Each one’s registered and probably has a bloodline better than any of yours.”
“I’d take that bet, especially in regard to my husband, but I’m in a charitable mood, so I’ll just explain things clearly for all of you. We’re tabling determining why your squad got the ax, for now.”
“Why?” Ishmael asked, eyes narrowed.
“Because you’ve landed yourselves into one of the bigger conspiracies going, and you’re all targets for assassination. Your missing and presumed very dead teammates are proof of that. How the rest of you are still alive is beyond me, but unless you go into some form of protective custody, you’re not going to be alive much longer.”
No one spoke for a moment, so we all heard the sound. It sounded like someone had dropped a heavy tin can. And then another. And another.
“Incoming!” Jerry shouted. “Grenades!”
CHAPTER 71
THERE WERE MANY TIMES I’d been grateful that A-Cs had hyperspeed, but none so much as this one.
“Into the limos! Shields on!” Jeff bellowed just before the first grenade went off, as he grabbed me, pulled me to him, and shielded me with his body.
It was a stun grenade, at least to judge by the fact that we all fell to the ground but weren’t hit with shrapnel or even falling debris. It felt like the world was shaking, my vision was barely there, my ears were ringing, and I was disoriented. The calm part of my mind mentioned that this still wasn’t as bad as any gate transfer when I was pregnant.
The dogs were all howling in pain. That the A-Cs weren’t was the surprise. Or rather, that one A-C wasn’t.
Jeff had been knocked down just like everyone else. But he recovered almost immediately. He leaped to his feet and picked me up off the ground, one arm around my waist. He went to the super hyperspeed, grabbed Reader, and flung the two of us inside the limo, onto White and Gower, who seemed to be recovering, though not as fast as Jeff had.
I got onto my knees on the seat as Jeff went back, flung Tim over his shoulder, grabbed Chuckie and Kevin, and tossed them all in on top of us. I just managed to avoid getting buried under the falling bodies. Jeff picked Len and Kyle up off the ground and flung them into the front seat.
He slammed the doors shut then raced over and tossed the flyboys into their limo. I could hear him, and he was shouting orders, in full-on Commander Mode, getting the other A-Cs up and moving. Each agent had a K-9 unit or two and dragged them into the nearest limos. Jeff grabbed Ishmael, who’d managed to hold on to Prince, and headed them for the nearest limo, which was the farthest from the one I was in.
I saw the laser shields go around our limo and the others, one by one, presumably indicating the human drivers were recovering, at least enough to hit the shield buttons.
Jeff was moving so fast he’d done all of this in about five seconds. A part of me marveled that I could see him at the super-duper speed. Most of me was just hoping he’d be fast enough to get inside one of the limos before the next grenade went off. Because while it was horrible, we’d heard at least three drop, and I knew only one had exploded. So far.
“Everyone able to see and hear?” Reader asked. There were fast assents. “Good. Len, you able to drive?”
“Yeah.”
“Then get ready to get us out of here as soon as Jeff’s in a limo. Kyle, get on the intercom and send that order to the other cars.”
I thought everyone was in a limo, so in relative safety, but as Jeff tossed Ishmael into his limo, Prince yanked away and raced off. I saw where he was heading—for one of the remaining grenades. And I didn’t think they were going to be as benign as the first one.
“Prince! No! Come here!” Hey, he was already my buddy. I tried to get out of the limo, but White and Gower grabbed and held onto me and I couldn’t.
Jeff saw the dog and didn’t hesitate. He ran and picked him up, as though Prince were a Pekinese instead of a German Shepherd. Which was great. Only they were now far from any of the limos.
I tried to see if they’d gotten away from the remaining bombs—only the world blew up around us.
CHAPTER 72
THE EXPLOSION WAS LOUD, and it shook like nothing I’d ever felt before. It was horrible, in a completely different way from the stun grenade. I could tell the remaining grenades had gone off at the same time, or close enough, but it felt like the whole world had exploded.
The noise was incredible—even louder than my screams, which were at the dog-only register. It rattled us even inside the laser shield. I almost bounced out of White and Gower’s hold, but they both clamped down, and I couldn’t get away to get out to Jeff.
“Let me go! Jeff’s out there!”
“We can’t go look for him until this stops,” Gower said.
“Why not?” I was still screaming and felt no need to stop.
Chuckie got over to me, took my face in his hands, and forced me to look at him. “Calm down. Right now,” he said sternly. “You can’t help him if you’re hysterical, and none of us can help him until it’s at least somewhat safe to get out of the car.”
“But—”
“Stop it! You don’t panic, you don’t freak out. You stay calm and in control until it’s all over and everyone’s safe. Then, and only then, do you get the luxury of freaking out, melting down, or losing control.” He was quoting my mother. She’d taught me, him, both of us, that. Mom had been in t
his situation many times before. And she’d trained us to handle it when we were teenagers.
I took a deep breath. It was shaky, but I shoved the hysterics away. Because Chuckie was right—I couldn’t help Jeff if I was a mess. I nodded.
Chuckie let go. “We can get out in a few seconds. Then we’ll find him, get him to medical, and it’ll be all right, Kitty. I promise.”
As the ringing from the explosion subsided, there was another sound. It reminded me of metal creaking. Big metal creaking in the way it does when it’s been stressed too much and isn’t going to be holding on much longer. “I know that sound. That’s a bad sound.”
“Let’s get Jeff and that stupid dog and get the hell out of here,” Tim snarled.
My hand was heading for the door handle when it opened. Prince was flung in and on top of me, meaning White was on the bottom of our dog pile this time. The door slammed shut. “Kid, do what the Head of Airborne said, and get us the hell out of here.”
Prince was lifted off me and placed rather gently on the floor. Jeff shoved everyone into seats and pulled me onto his lap. Kyle was on the intercom, passing along the “leave now” orders.
Len floored it and raced off, the other limos hightailing it out of there with us, as chunks of concrete started falling. They bounced off of the limos. The taxis weren’t so lucky. I hoped Ishmael and his crew had good auto insurance.
Jeff looked fine, a little mussed up, but there was no blood I could see. I did the whole pat-down thing. Nothing seemed broken, out of place, wet, or otherwise harmed. “You’re alive.” I managed to say this without bursting into tears. Just barely.
He hugged me. “I’m okay, baby. And so’s the dog. Who’s too brave for his own good.” Jeff patted Prince’s head where he thought I couldn’t see. “I was able to get us behind a bearing wall away from the blast. My ears are still ringing, and I’d bet his are, too, but otherwise, we’re just fine.”
I looked behind us. The garage was collapsing. “There were more bombs, besides the grenades they tossed in for us, weren’t there?”
