Alien in the House

Chapter 33



THERE WAS THE USUAL BEDLAM. It was stopped quickly. Because we had a troubadour in the room.

“Everyone, calm down!” Raj had total calm authority going in his tone. I’d only heard a few people sound more authoritative, and I was married to one of them. Mom would have been proud. Everyone shut up immediately. “Kitty, Ravi, are you alright?”

“I am. Ravi?”

“If you get off of me, I should be fine.”

“Most people don’t complain.”

“Most of their fiancées aren’t in the room.”

“Good point. A little help?”

Raj got me to my feet, then helped Ravi. “Is everyone okay?” he asked as Jennifer flung herself into Ravi’s arms. I’d never seen Ravi look so proud, happy, or smug.

Took a look around as everyone else said they were fine. There were less everyones than I’d been expecting. And I’d just noticed this room was short about ten people I’d been thinking I’d see here. I was not batting even close to a thousand tonight. “Where’s Olga and Mona and everyone?”

“Under the circumstances, this didn’t seem to be the best place for them to wait,” Jennifer said as she extracted herself from Ravi and went back to being professional. “Len and Kyle agreed. Jeremy took them to the fourth floor. There’s a nice sitting room there, where they could be comfortable.”

“And where Mossad and the Bahraini Royal Guard couldn’t check out what the boys are doing here.” Camilla sounded like she thought whoever had sent them up to this floor was an idiot.

“It seemed like a good idea at the time,” said idiot replied. Without too much resentment or defensiveness in my tone. At least, I hoped.

She shook her head. “We’re under attack. That means everyone’s a suspect, and everyone’s a potential enemy.”

“I don’t normally think that way.” Well, I didn’t normally think that way. Thanks to Colonel Hamlin’s visit, I was thinking that way constantly tonight.

“Time to start.” She was examining where the disk had been.

Chose not to share that Camilla could be proud I’d already started on a full-blown case of paranoia and also had her on the Suspects List. She might be pleased or might be pissed, and since it was a fifty-fifty shot, I chose discretion as the better part of valor.

“Jeremy’s staying with the guests on the fourth floor, just in case a fast exit is needed. And Len and Kyle are with them, too,” Jennifer said, sounding worried. “Was that alright?”

“Yes, that’s great, Jennifer. Don’t let Camilla throw you. She’s still working on her people skills.”

Camilla snorted a laugh. “Takes one to know one.”

“No argument. So, what do you think? Of what just happened, the explosion, I mean. I’m clear you’re not happy with our lack of distrust and stealth.”

She was quiet for a bit. “As explosions went, it wasn’t a very big one,” Camilla said finally. “But it was powerful enough. I think it would have taken Ravi’s hands, and possibly his head. So that means it was a contained explosion, and that takes skill.” She turned to me. “How did you know it was going to blow?”

“No idea. I just did. And I know that sounds totally lame, but it’s all I’ve got, sorry.” I wondered where the Poofs or Peregrines had been. This seemed like a time when they should have intervened.

Then again, I hadn’t been in danger, and maybe they didn’t consider the hackers to be part of our Embassy. Except I knew that Jennifer and Ravi had Poofs. We had so many Poofs, the rest of the hackers probably had them, too. And the Peregrines loved Omega Red for whatever reason and they were warming up to Big George, too. Couldn’t speak for the Poofs or Peregrines, but my cats thought Henry was da bomb for whatever reason, and that meant the Poofs would think he was okay, too. And my dogs loved Stryker, presumably because he always smelled like food and was a crumb smorgasbord. So, the animals certainly considered the hackers part of that which made up “us.”

Maybe it was a simple reason—this wasn’t something that keen animal senses could have picked up. When someone’s about to shoot they give off physical and mental clues, small and many times almost imperceptible, but not if you’re an animal trained for thousands of years to protect. Even a highly trained assassin would give off some smell or vibrations that were different.

But the disc had just been a piece of equipment. It wouldn’t have told an animal it was going to go boom.

So why had it told me?

“Kitty’s reason is fine with me,” Ravi said as he joined Camilla. “I’m happy to still have my hands and head.”

“Is there anything left?” Raj asked as Ravi examined where the disc had been.

“Nothing.” Jennifer brought his Bluetooth over from wherever it had gone when Ravi and I had hit the ground. He put it back on. “You still there? Yes, sorry, had no idea it was going to explode, either. No, the ambassador saved me. Kitty. Yes.” He turned to me. “Serene says that next time you need to bring anything like this you find to her.”

“Serene’s your contact at Dulce?” Managed to stop myself from asking how she’d gotten there. She’d taken the gate in the bathroom and gone to work, was the obvious answer.

“Yes.” He listened again. “Got it. Yes. Absolutely.” He laughed. “I’ll tell them.” Ravi turned back to me. “They got a little before the disc blew. Serene said that she’s going to look for explosive signatures and she’ll let you know what she finds. She agrees with Camilla’s assessment that it was a contained explosion, and she’s got some ideas. She also said to tell you, Kitty, that she expects you to check in with her the moment you find another one of these discs.”

“How did they get anything? That explosion was instantaneous.”

Raj coughed. “Not for us.”

“Oh, right.” If you can move at hyperspeed, some things do indeed seem slower. I still wasn’t seeing things in slow motion. Chose not to wonder if the A-Cs felt they were walking through gelatin every moment of their lives. Jeff had never indicated such, and when I could see people moving at hyperspeed it didn’t make me feel like everything else was moving slowly, so maybe it was all in the perspective.

“Serene’s an explosives expert,” Camilla added. “If anyone could get something from what little we had, it’ll be her.”

“True enough. I wish I had brought it to her, because now we have nothing.”

“I’m sorry, Kitty,” Ravi said. “There were no outward signs of a bomb or a trigger. And I definitely looked.”

“Well, this just goes under the ‘our luck holds firm’ heading. It wasn’t really your fault, Ravi.” It was mine, for not going straight to Alpha Team. And I knew I was going to hear about it from the rest of Alpha Team as soon as they found out, too. “I have a related question for you, anyway.”

“Go ahead.”

“If someone can make a device like what just blew up, that can stop the most powerful empath from feeling anyone within at least a football field radius, could that same person make a device that could put an emotional overlay or similar onto a person? So that, say, I could be furious and ready to kill someone, but all an empath would feel was that I was happy and thoughtful?”

“I’d think so,” Ravi said.

“Absolutely,” Stryker chimed in. “It’s already been done, in that sense, with the androids.”

“But the androids had the full range of human emotions. Jeff was able to find them based on things like murderous rage.”

Big George shrugged. “So what? They were last year’s model.”

“We found them this year.”

“It’s a figure of speech, Kitty,” Big George said. “And you know it.”

Henry chimed in for the first time. “You always strive to achieve more, Kitty. To make something more effective, smaller but more efficient, and so forth. Think of cell phones. The first ones were bricks. Now you can get tiny ones, and even though the trend is going larger again, they’re sleek and thousands of times more powerful than the first models.”

“And they’re always coming out with new models.”

“Right. Every six months or faster. So, you see—”

I recognized Henry going into lecture mode. “Selling past the close, Doctor Wu. Cease now, I’m on board.”

He snapped his mouth shut and gave me a dirty look. “You don’t catch on as fast as you like to pretend.”

True enough tonight. But I wasn’t going to tell him that. “Oh, blah, blah, blah.” Looked around. Omega Red was intent on his Braille keyboard and didn’t seem to be paying attention. “Yuri, your thoughts?”

He didn’t reply, but his fingers kept on moving,

“Yuri. Yuri Stanislav. Omega Red. Dude with the sunglasses on—what are you working on? Or are you asleep? Just please don’t be dead, I’ve had enough of that tonight.”

“Just a minute, Kitty,” he said absently.

“Time’s wasting, Yuri. We are busy people with a lot of horrible conspiracies to identify and thwart.”

“Really?” Big George sounded incredibly thrilled.

“Really, but I want Yuri to chime in on our bug situation.”

“I haven’t been paying attention to that, Kitty,” Omega Red said without any shame in his tone whatsoever.

“Are you kidding me? Why not?”

“Because I’ve been doing something else. It’s related, so calm down.”

“Tell me what you’ve been doing that’s related and I’ll think about not kicking you.”

“You won’t kick me, and not just because I’m blind and that would be wrong. I think I’ve found the company that’s created something very similar to what you described.”

“The bug or the overlay?”

“Both.”

“Awesome. Let me guess, Titan Security.”

“No. Gaultier Enterprises.”