“I promise, Mom. Cliff and his team are going down, not me or my team.”
“Good. Leave Gadhavi and G-Company alone. Don’t engage with them unless you’re forced to. There are too many of them and now isn’t the time.”
“Will do, Mom. Love you, and love to Dad.”
“Love you, too, Kitty.”
We hung up, and I wasn’t scared anymore. I was pissed and worried and excited, but not scared. However, I had no plan at all now, since all our prep seemed to have been cancelled out.
Left the bathroom, left my stuff all over the floor, and trotted out to the main area. Buchanan and Siler were inside with the others now, and Alpha Team was back onsite, too.
“We’re trying to determine next steps,” Reader said to me.
“Originally there was going to be a large dinner,” Raheem said. “What are your thoughts on that?”
Our relaxed, three-hour combination tea and planning session seemed so very long ago. Checked Mr. Watch. “My God, it’s only six thirty in the evening?” Good. That meant the dinner could still be on.
“Time flies when you’re having fun,” Vance said, sarcasm meter around eight on the scale. “But if the dinner was planned, is it wise to change or cancel it, Your Majesty?”
Raheem shrugged. “Under these circumstances, Queen Katherine can say or ask for whatever she wants.”
“Oh, Queen Katherine wants to go to that dinner and she wants everyone on Team Commando to go to that dinner, too.” Shared the intel I’d gotten from Mom and her assumptions about the same.
“We should just have the P.T.C.U. raid it and keep you out of it,” Buchanan said the moment I was done.
“Per your boss and my mother, you’re going to need me and my special skill set.”
Tim’s phone beeped. “Uh oh.”
“What?” half the room asked.
“Jeff’s on his way here. With the head Themnir and head Lyssara and any other aliens who’ve landed already or will land shortly. They’re going to be coming to the State Dinner. Apparently someone invited them.”
Raheem shook his head. “No one should have done that. The dinner was set up to honor Queen Katherine, only, and no one other than those already here were invited. Give me a moment to verify who did not follow my instructions.” He got onto his phone and started speaking rapidly, as he stepped into one of the other rooms. Butler followed him, though he stood a polite distance away.
“So that means Chuckie’s coming, too, right?”
Tim nodded. “I’d assume so. My text came from Chuck.”
“Why’d he contact you and not me?” Reader asked. “I’m not mad, I’m just curious.”
Tim’s phone beeped again and he snorted a laugh. “Because I’m the Head of Airborne. He’s telling me that the rest of my team will be in the helicarrier, cloaked, hanging out in the Persian Gulf.”
“Do they know the Treeship is landing there?”
“Yes, and they’re going to be there to assist if needed. But they want to remain close to the President, and under the circumstances, they’re right. But that means that Chuck will be here for sure.”
Raheem returned and he looked worried and furious. “No one from my team will claim responsibility. They insist that no one invited the President, nor have any of them heard from him or his secretary or anyone else from the White House.”
Looked at Butler, who nodded. Nice to have him verifying that Raheem wasn’t lying to us. It also wasn’t hard to guess what was going on. “None of your people invited Jeff. Cliff invited Jeff. It’s a trap.”
“And every leader in the Middle East and every religious leader in the world will be at this dinner,” Lorraine said.
“For all we know, other world leaders have been invited, too,” Claudia added. Which earned looks of horror from the entire room.
Raheem got back on his phone and trotted out of the room again. Butler remained at his Listening-In Post.
“Invited and able to come are two different things,” Mona pointed out.
“Not with us,” I countered. “If they’ve been invited, they’ll all use gates to get there, and there won’t be any delays or issues with that, because they’re all with Field agents doing their best to accommodate these people and make them continue to be happy and play nicely with others. Wow, Cliff’s amazing.”
This earned me the room’s full attention. “Excuse me?” Mona asked, clearly speaking for everyone.
Mossy rolled his eyes. “Seriously?” Okay, Mona wasn’t speaking for everyone. “There is no way in the world that your enemy could have planned to attack the State Dinner because it was only planned in the last few hours and the likelihood that the summits were going to dissolve into the usual human bickering was high, so there would have been no need to attack it. Things worked out far better than anyone could have expected, so he had to regroup and form a new plan, which he’s done far faster than we’ve formed our new plan. She’s impressed by her enemy’s abilities. That’s not a bad thing—it’s far better to realize when your enemy is superior to you, so that you can look for their weaknesses, than to consider yourself invincible and discover that belief to be untrue.”
“Mossy, I sincerely feel this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship. What he said. All of it. The Treeship is landing at dawn and I guarantee Cliff knows it. If he’s in with the Indian Mafia, and he is for certain, then he’s got access to their spy network, so he knows when the ship is landing and everything else that’s going on. He has the same amount of time we do to stop us, only he has the luxury of knowing that if he misses here, he still has all those aliens, the Q’vox in particular, to capture and clone. And he has the Aicirtap coming, too.”
“He’ll be eaten just like the rest of us,” Vance said.
“I doubt he believes that, and I refuse to believe we’re going to get eaten by them. Well, as long as we win. If Cliff succeeds in killing all the world leaders, that means he has a plan for how to deal with the Aicirtap and the Z’porrah, too.”
“He will have no need to deal with the Z’porrah,” Raheem said as he returned, “if what Prince Gustav promised happens.”
“It won’t happen if Drax is killed,” Reader said.
“Cliff will just figure out a way to tell the Vatusan Royal Family that we killed Gustav and that will be that. I don’t care what Cliff’s plan is to handle the Aicirtap. I care that we stop him tonight, before he can kill everyone he wants to, which includes my husband and everyone in this room. We’ll worry about the Aicirtap tomorrow, when, the way our luck runs, they’ll show up.”