by Gini Koch
Pierre was there and he beamed. “So good to have you and our little princess back, Kitty darling.” Jamie giggled and held out her arms to Pierre, who scooped her out of mine. “I see my Jamie missed her Uncle Pierre,” he cooed at her. “I also see you’re all bustling off about more exciting diplomatic business. Shall I just hold onto our little one and leave Mommy’s arms free?”
There was no way Jeff was going to have time to give Jamie attention right now, and I wasn’t going to let him hold her while Bellie was on his shoulder anyway. “Sure, Pierre, that’d be great. Ah, is there anything to eat?”
He grinned. “Yes indeed. Your lovely mother-in-law called and told me to ensure all of you kept on eating well once you were back here. I believe she’s worried about your Jeff’s eating habits, too.”
I snorted. “Jeff’s a healthy eater. I’m not. So, um, any brownies around?”
“Indeed there are.” He went to the pantry. “A plate of Lucinda Martini’s brownies, if you please.” Opened the pantry door, there they were. The Elves had come through once again. Pierre handed them to me. “I must say I love working and living here.”
I grabbed a brownie. Considered, and took the plate. “Me too. I’m going to bring these in for the others.” I was willing to take one for the team, especially since that meant I could snag another brownie while being kind and generous.
Gave Pierre a one-armed hug, gave Jamie a big kiss, and headed off down the hall to Jeff’s office.
Fortunately his office, like everything else in the Embassy, was spacious, because we had more people in here than I’d left in the hall.
Our in-person additions were Christopher and Amy, both of whom looked slightly mussed and only somewhat happy to be here, along with Kevin Lewis, who was my mom’s right hand man in the P.T.C.U. and assigned to a permanent berth at the Embassy, Tito, Melanie, and Emily. There was a video conference going, and I could see Alpha and Airborne on screen.
Everyone in the room and on the screen looked at me as I came in. “About time,” Christopher snapped.
“Sorry. I’m not the one who dragged you out of bed for the latest War Room discussion. Brownie? They’re Lucinda’s.”
Christopher, Amy, White, and Buchanan all grabbed a brownie before anyone else. Yeah, we’d gotten used to the good eating, even Buchanan. Sure he’d housed in the servants’ luxury pad, but Lucinda had insisted he eat dinner with us every night and had ensured he had plenty of snackage during the day.
I took the plate around to everyone, in part to be polite and in part so that the brownies stayed near to me. Jeff sighed as he took one. “Where’s Jamie?”
“I traded her for a plate of brownies and some magic beans. She’s with Pierre, getting cuddles and tons of one-on-one attention.” I managed to stop myself from mentioning that the person I’d expected to be doing that was Jeff. We were occupied. And, of course, he had his bird.
Who, it turned out, had her own Special Perch in his office. I wondered if there was some sort of Parrots Anonymous group I could drag Jeff to. Soon.
“So, now that you’re all snacking, can we get back to business?” Reader sounded annoyed. Probably bummed there were no brownies wherever Alpha Team was.
“How did the cleanup go?” I asked.
“And I’d very much like to know how our instructor, John, fared,” White added.
“Thankfully we were able to call in field teams as well as the Operations team, and because they evacuated the humans, they were able to use hyperspeed,” Reader said. “Everything but the gate hub is fixed and like new. The hub’s a little trickier, but it should be completed by tomorrow if not sooner.”
“And the instructor’s fine,” Gower added. “Shaken, but in a safe location, being debriefed.”
“Was he in on the attack?”
“No,” Tim said. “NASA had surveillance tapes running. Watch.”
There were several screens running. Actually, there were a lot of screens, with a lot of images running, but our particular focus was only on a set of them. With this and Serene in the room I realized Alpha and Airborne were at Imageering Control, or what I called the Bat Cave Level of the Dulce Science Center. I felt a pang. I still missed living there. The Embassy was great, but it wasn’t the Lair.
I pulled my focus back to the screens. One showed us arriving in our limo, with Buchanan right behind us. The other cars arriving raised no suspicions.
The employees parking lot showed John arriving in an older Toyota Corolla. He drove and parked carefully, but rushed out of his car and to the employees’ entrance. I checked the timestamp—he’d arrived about when we had, which would make sense if he was called in to manage the test.
There were plenty of other feeds, including some that showed walls, floors and ceilings exploding. Each explosion left a rather human-sized hole. I was kind of impressed. You couldn’t see that the cause of the explosions was me and Sandra slamming through.
“It’s like watching a Bugs Bunny cartoon,” Tim said, as the feeds started over again. “Nice job, Kitty.”
“Yeah, well, you try fighting off an android without weapons of any kind and then complain to me about some building damage. Speaking of which, what’s the status on my least favorite robot?”
“You tossing her in with the ’gators shorted out her self-destruct mechanism,” Reader said. “So, damages aside, this could really be an actual win for our side. She’s being examined now. Lorraine and Claudia are overseeing it. They’ll let us know what they find.”
“I want to see the results as soon as possible,” Chuckie said.
“Oh, yes, sir,” Reader snapped. Clearly there was something about being the Head of the Field—it meant you weren’t nice at all to the guy who you reported to in the C.I.A.
“You know what I don’t see in all the video feeds running on constant replay?” I said before any more alpha male sniping could continue. “I don’t see the people who attacked Jeff, Christopher, and Chuckie arriving. Nor do I see Sandra arriving.”
“Maybe they were already there, lying thd Cdormant,” Serene suggested.
“That would be a remarkably poor use of resources,” Chuckie said. “The android, fine I suppose you could leave her in some kind of stasis until activated. But the people who attacked the three of us were humans.”
“You’re sure?” I asked.
Christopher nodded. “They were a lot easier to beat than the androids we’ve faced. They could have been a problem if they’d surprised us, but they didn’t. Jeff and I handled them pretty easily.”
I thought about this. “They weren’t prepared for an A-C to be there. Maybe Richard, but he was in the examination room with everyone else.” And every bad guy who knew that the former Pontifex now kicked butt was dead. “I wonder . . . Chuckie, did you mention that Jeff and Christopher would be along?”
“No. It wasn’t relevant to the test.”
“You think they were only after Reynolds, girlfriend?”
“Yeah, James, I do. I think they wanted to get rid of me and Chuckie.”
“What about the rest of us?” Amy asked. “We were all in the room, and that horrid android shot at us.”
“No,” Buchanan said slowly. “She really only shot at me and Mister White because we were trying to help Kitty. She ignored the rest of you. I think she would have killed you if you’d gotten in the way, but you weren’t her target.”
Jeff looked thoughtful. “The only reason we moved from the waiting area was because you were antsy,” he s
aid to Chuckie. “If we hadn’t had the incident with the senator earlier in the day, would you have been as jumpy?”
“Probably not,” Chuckie admitted. “And that means I’d have been right where they expected me.”
“So Senator Armstrong, Monsieur Love, and dear Vance weren’t actually involved with or connected to the NASA attack.”
Yi
CHAPTER 18
EVERYONE IN THE ROOM AND ON-SCREEN looked at me. “Mind explaining
that, Kitty?” Tim finally asked. “What does Senator Armstrong have to do with any of this?”
I looked at Jeff. “Don’t they know?”
He looked uncomfortable. “Not really.” Chuckie and Christopher looked equally embarrassed. So they’d kept this Embassy-Only. This news wasn’t going to make Alpha Team happy.
“Jeff, what’s going on?” Reader asked. Interesting. He had a Commander Voice now. And it was on full.
All the men in the room with me seemed remarkably embarrassed. Chuckie I could understand, in that sense. Maybe Jeff, too. But not the others.
“Oh, for God’s sake. How old are all of you, twelve?” Amy turned to the screen. thd had the i“Someone doctored up dirty pictures of Kitty and Chuck doing the deed. That reporter who’s always hanging around warned Chuck they were out there. Senator Armstrong showed up with that weirdo, Guy Gadoire, and his husband, to share the pictures with us today. The senator said he wasn’t trying to blackmail Kitty and that the pictures had been sent to him anonymously. Not sure any of us buy that, but what Kitty’s saying is that if the senator was involved, then whoever set that android on us would have sent a hit squad capable of taking out Christopher and Jeff, too, not just Chuck.”
“Succinctly put, Ames.” She was really coming along. I felt all proud.
Alpha Team seemed shocked into silence. Airborne, however, were also in attendance, and my flyboys never missed a beat. “So, can we see the pictures?” Jerry asked, miraculously with a straight face. “Purely in the interests of law and science.”
“Yeah,” Matt Hughes agreed. “We should know what the fake pictures look like, so we’re able to denounce them.”
“And so we can be sure we’re looking for the right negatives,” Chip Walker added.
“We’re married men,” Randy Muir said, as Joe Billings nodded his head. “So we can look at the pictures safely, since there’s no way we’d be looking for any reason other than investigative interest.”
“How many shots were there?” Joe asked. “I mean, enough for a full calendar, or just a poster-type one with a single photo?”
“Oh, I’ll bet there were plenty,” Jerry said. “I mean, you can’t blackmail someone with just one shot.”
“True enough,” Hughes agreed. “There are probably extra sets hidden in various hideouts, too.”
“I say we get right on it,” Walker said. “We don’t want dirty pictures of Kitty in anyone’s hands but ours.”
“Awww, you guys just warm my heart. And while I think it’s great of you to offer to sacrifice yourselves for the cause, I actually had another unit in mind for this job.”
Once again, all heads swiveled toward me. “Just who were you planning on bringing in on this?” Jeff asked. He sounded lost, frustrated, and a little freaked out. Why? He’d known about this weeks longer than I had. Surely he’d had time to adjust to the idea that this “news” was going to get out one day.
“Really? Well, first off, the person who let Chuckie know what was going on in the first place. And, to assist him, I’m going to do what any normal person in this situation would do.”
“Pay the blackmail?” Naomi asked.
“Make a sex tape with Jeff to show your range?” Abigail suggested.
“Go on Leno to confess and say you’re really, really sorry?” was Amy’s contribution.
“Request your own reality show?” Melanie chimed in.
“Go back to your roots to ‘find yourself’ and reconnect with the simple girl you used to be?” Emily offered as her option.
Clearly the gals were on the same wavelength as the flyboys. The others seemed cluelessee as her s. Alone on my own wavelength. Always the way.
“No. What normal people do when they’re being blackmailed is to go to professionals for help. We have a special K-9 unit that owes us, big time. I’m going to get Mister Joel Oliver and Senator Armstrong together, and we’re all going to go to the police.”
“I don’t want you going to the police,” Jeff said in the growly man voice he seemed to still somehow believe I obeyed anywhere other than in bed. “We can handle this ourselves.”
“Blackmail tends to fall to the F.B.I.,” Kevin said quickly. “Though I’m not recommending that we contact that agency for help. I’m just pointing out that the police rarely focus on those kinds of cases.”
“The K-9 guys are a special unit. They may have been somewhat unimpressive in terms of their taxi services, but they were spot on when it came to surveillance. So we set a team of spies to catch a team of spies.”
Chuckie sighed. “I can’t argue with the idea. In part because you haven’t actually taken or passed the HSAC test.”
“Seriously? You’re actually going to insist we go through all that again?”
“The instructor actually had everyone’s tests in his hands,” Gower said. “He’d clutched them in panic, and they made it out of the building with him. I asked, as Pontifex, for them to be processed immediately. So, ah, everyone other than you, Kitty, is approved.”
I let this one sit on the air for a moment. “So, what you’re saying, Paul and Chuckie, is that everyone other than me can discuss whatever the hell is going on that Jeff, Christopher, and Chuckie spent time stressing was a bigger deal than my faked photos. But I can’t. Is that right?”
“Right.” Gower didn’t say this with a lot of enthusiasm I was fairly sure I saw Tim and Reader wincing. Checked the expressions of the men in the room with me. Check, they all looked ready for me to get seriously mad.
“Correct,” Chuckie said. He looked at Jeff. “Let her go to the police and handle this with Mister Joel Oliver, who also hasn’t taken the HSAC test. It’ll keep him out of our hair, keep Kitty occupied, and possibly get that problem fixed before we have to worry about the bigger issue.”
“She shouldn’t be doing that,” Jeff argued. “It’s not a good idea for an Ambassador to head to police headquarters to show off naked pictures of herself. And I don’t want those getting out.”
“Guys, I’m in the room. Still. I clearly have to mention. And, the pictures are already out, Jeff. Since I can’t do anything else until I’m all alone in another special room with another android trying to kill me while I take a ridiculous test that makes no sense, let me handle this. Chuckie’s right. It’ll distract me.”
Jeff gave me a look that said he knew I was up to something and, even though he had no idea what it was, he didn’t approve. “I don’t like it.”
“I don’t like your new avian mistress, but I’m dealing.” I looked to Chuckie. “That plan sit okay with you, Secret Agent Man?”
“Yeah. Take Len and Kyle.” He looked at Buchanan. “You’ll go back to being her shadow?”
“Yeah. I don’t care about the other issue, whatever it is.”
I got the distinct impression Buchanan was lying like a wet rug, but I was also fairly sure the others weren’t picking this up. Jeff might have been, but if so, he didn’t say anything.
“I’ll accompany Missus Martini as well,” White said. “I’m sure I’ll be more helpful there than here.”
White was lying, too. Well, it was always nice to have backup.
“So I won’t be alone.” I went over to Jeff and gave him a quick kiss. Bellie cawed and squawked indignantly. “I love you. Do something about that bird before I get back, because she’s dancing on my last nerve. I’m going to take Jamie to Denise, so Pierre’s free. I’ll check in as needed.”
Jeff stood up and hugged me. “Be good, baby, and be careful. Call if you need anything or think you’re being f
ollowed by anyone other than Buchanan.”
I hugged him back and went to the door. I contemplated suggesting that, barring Bellie having taken and passed the HSAC, they refrain from talking about whatever was going on in front of her.
Then I reconsidered. Bellie was a bigmouth. I’d find out what was really up one way or another, even if it meant giving my feathered nemesis bird treats.
Yi
&nbs
p; CHAPTER 19
WE WERE NEAR THE FRONT DOOR when the doorbell rang. I could have waited for Pierre to race over to get it, but I was right there, so I opened the door.
A tall, blond-haired man who looked to be somewhere in his mid-to-late thirties stood there. He was dressed like every other go-getter in D.C. seemed to be—expensive, tailored navy suit, nice wingtips, official political haircut that was just this side of a Marine high and tight. He also radiated a look I’d gotten used to from spending over half my life around Chuckie—intelligence.
He looked vaguely familiar, but I couldn’t place him at all. “Can I help you?”
He nodded. “I’m looking for Charles Reynolds.”
“And you’re looking for him at the American Centaurion Embassy why?”
He smiled. “I’m sorry. I’m Cliff Goodman, the Head of Special Immigration Services for Homeland Security. Chuck told me he was here.”
“Oh! Sorry, come on in, Mister Goodman.” Per Chuckie, I’d met him already. I was thankful he didn’t bring it up, since he still wasn’t looking anything more than vaguely familiar.
“Thanks. And please, call me Cliff. You must be Kitty. Chuck’s told me a lot about you.” He was going for the polite pretend, I assumed because it was clear I’d had no idea who he was.
“Has he?”
ow?and had n“Yeah. He’s very proud of you. I can’t blame him. You’ve really moved fast in your career.”
“Thanks again.” I had no idea which career or careers Cliff was referring to, and figured Chuckie would appreciate my not sharing in case Cliff wasn’t in the know about everything.
Buchanan, who’d been nearby and witnessed all this, went down the hall, presumably to get Chuckie. White extended his hand. “Richard White. Nice to meet you, sir.”
Cliff smiled again as he shook White’s hand. “It’s an honor to meet you, Former Pontifex White.” Well he knew enough to know who White was. Whether this was good, bad, or indifferent, I had no guess. “I’d hoped to meet you at the President’s Ball, but that did get a little out of hand.”
