Alien in the House

Chapter 84



“WE DON’T WANT TO kill the assassin?” Jeff asked. “Why not?”

“Because right now the person who’s most likely able to identify who the Mastermind is would be Raul,” Gower explained.

We enjoyed a long moment of silence. “I’ll let Mossad know,” Tim said as he went back to his texting frenzy.

“Good catch, Paul. No killing Raul until we get who took over for Reid out of him. Okay, so Mossad’s confirmed what we suspected there. What about a girl? There was a female Dier serving, or not serving, water at our party, too.”

“There’s no female relative that they can find, for either Reid or Raul, other than the mother who’s dead,” Tim reported. “And Bernie, who Buchanan killed.”

“So was she legit and just has a weird spelling of the name?” Christopher asked.

“That seems like too much of a coinkydink to me.”

Vance shrugged. “What’s hard about this? Dude’s found a new woman.”

Chuckie nodded. “Sound theory and it makes sense. He was used to working with his wife.”

Tim continued to text. “They’ll look into new known female associates. Raul’s not on radar a lot. If he was, he’d be dead. He was released from custody a lot sooner than any of us knew, by the way, and right before Mossad could take him out.”

“Well, we know the Mastermind has a ton of pull. So, can we prove that Raul killed all the reps?”

“Doubtful,” Oliver said. “In part because I doubt that he killed all of them.”

The entire room stared at Oliver. Tim even stopped texting for a few seconds again. “Excuse me?” Jeff asked finally.

Oliver shrugged. “Raul the Assassin probably did not kill all of the people whose deaths we’re investigating. I’m sure he killed his fair share, mind you. He killed Eugene Montgomery, of course, but I believe we already knew that.”

“Right, he was disguised as SWAT. But what about Edmund Brewer? We think it was Clarence, but he could have had help.”

As I thought about it, the man who’d pointedly held the elevator for Brewer could have been Raul. I’d only seen him once, when he was in SWAT gear, and I’d been very distracted at that time. And I hadn’t really paid any attention to the people at the Cairo.

“That death may be attributable, but we have no confirmation yet. Madame Olga has a theory. However, until Representative Reyes was killed, and then Eugene Montgomery was killed immediately thereafter, she’d no more put things together than anyone else.”

“I had,” Vance mentioned.

“Yes, I shared that with her. She said that you might be allowed inside the Romanian Embassy as a welcomed guest in the future.”

“I feel so honored.”

“You should.” Chose not to mention that the invitation probably didn’t include Gadoire. “So, what did Olga deign to share?”

“Well, I must say that until the young gentlemen came back with their sad news, I believe Olga was as in the dark as the rest of us,” Oliver said. “But Representative Brewer’s death triggered her feeling that Eugene Montgomery is the key.”

“And she thinks that we’re not paying attention to the important things,” Kyle added. “And she realizes we have over twenty Congressmen dead but she means besides them.”

Mouths opened, mine included. “Olga knows Eugene wasn’t a politician,” Len said quickly. Mouths closed. “And she’s not discounting those deaths, just thinks they’re not telling us what we need to know. She also likes your Sith Lord idea.”

“But she’s not wild about the L name theory,” Kyle said.

“I believe her exact words were ‘even if those appointments were all with the same person, you have no proof that person is the one you seek,’” Oliver shared. “We’re taking that to mean Olga feels we could better use our time elsewhere.”

“By figuring out who the Sith Lord is,” Kyle said.

“It’s not Eugene,” Len added. “But, as Mister Joel Oliver said, he’s the key.”

“Why?” Mom asked.

“Because he doesn’t fit the pattern,” Amy answered. The hackers all nodded, but didn’t speak. Got the impression they were at least as afraid of Amy as they were of me, possibly more.

“What do you mean?” Chuckie asked her.

“Every other death looks like it’s natural or an accident, right?” The room gave its general consensus. “But Eugene killed Santiago very publicly.”

“And in such a way he was caught immediately,” Michael added. Abigail nodded, nudged Naomi, who was alternating between looking lovingly at Chuckie and glancing at her cell phone. Naomi nodded, too. Clearly we had at least three-quarters of Team Gower in agreement with Amy, if I pretended Naomi was paying attention.

“He was trying to kill Edmund Brewer,” I said. As the words left my mouth I could practically see Olga give me her Encouraging the Slow of Wit look. “Hang on. What’re our thoughts about the whole robot theory thing? As in, do we think others got the same packet and sales pitch, or was that for Eugene, only?”

“Show of hands for who’d believe that if they’d been approached,” Amy said. Every hand in the room went up. “Okay, right, but we know more than the average person.”

“A good number of the representatives are in the know, too,” Mom said.

“Half the country would believe,” Stryker said. “Especially if you showed them the packet we saw.”

“So, anyone approached was likely to believe it, but good try, Ames. But, the next question is, would you, the bad guys at Gaultier who are working on the next level of robotic manipulations, share this randomly with a bunch of politicians? And if you did, why? It would potentially expose that you had androids out there already that were really good at passing for human.”

“You’d show to recruit,” Chuckie said. “But why would you want to? And recruit for what? If you’ve created robots who are passing as representatives, you don’t show your next victims so they know you’re going to kill and replace them.”

“You also don’t take specific, detailed, accurate technical information and toss it around randomly,” Ravi said. “I’m not joking—I believe we can build a working robot from that information, and by ‘we’ I don’t mean Dulce. I mean we like Amy and Kitty.”

“I think I should resent that somehow.”

“Oh, I do resent that, no somehow,” Amy said.

“Point made,” Chuckie said, presumably to keep Ravi alive. “And I don’t believe Pia was really trying to stop the robot makers, either.”

“Mossad agrees with you,” Tim said. “No way she was trying to stop these particular bad guys. My bet, and they’ll research it, is that she was connected to Antony Marling in some way. And because we’re all tense, I’m not going to make a French Connection joke.”

“Your self-restraint is impressive, Megalomaniac Lad.”

“Okay, so what was Eugene doing with the full packet of schematics?” Amy asked. “Do you think he stole it from Gaultier? He wasn’t working on that project, we’ve confirmed that both with his supervisor and our own research.”

“Why did he take the job at Gaultier?” I asked. “He was freelancing. Maybe he was trying to find information for Pia.”

“Or confirm the information she gave him,” Naomi said, proving she was at least listening with one ear.

“I’d want confirmation,” Abigail added. “You know, before I tried to murder someone and all.”

“Maybe, but I don’t know that we’ll ever know,” Reader said. “And if we do figure it out, I don’t think it’ll be today, because Eugene and Pia are both dead.”

“If we’re disregarding the letter L theory,” Raj said, “then perhaps we should also assume that there is no group of Stop the Robot Representatives people forming, either.”

“Raj . . . you complete me.” Raj grinned while Jeff and Reader both glared. Felt all special for a minute.

“If we assume that Eugene was the only one shown the information by Pia, then that begs certain other questions,” White said. “To Olga’s point, why Eugene Montgomery?”

“Can I ask a question or two before we try to answer that?” Michael asked.

“Certainly,” White said with a smile. “We’re all on the same team.”

“Okay. I understand the Master and Apprentice thing, at least I think that’s what you mean by the Sith Lord theory, right?”

“Yes,” Henry said. He looked like he was going to keep going, but Amy shot him a glare almost worthy of her husband and he shut up.

“Okay. But why do we think there’s only one Apprentice?” Michael asked.

“Because that’s how it is in the movies,” Stryker and I said in unison. We looked at each other. “Eddy, does that reply seem as totally lame to you, now that we said it out loud, as it does to me?”

Stryker grimaced. “Yeah. Sort of.”

“Totally, dude. Totally. And, come to think of it, before we went to brunch, Raj had already posited the idea of more than one. Sorry, Chuckie and Mom, I forgot.”

“Me too,” Raj said quickly.

“And he’s a loyal suck-up, too. I love that in Embassy staff.”

Tim snorted. “You like that in everyone.”

“What’s your point? Anyway, sorry, where are you going with this, Michael?”

He shrugged. “I get why you’d only have a few people in the know, but when we’re choosing who gets to go into space and who doesn’t we start with a select group and we whittle them down via a variety of trials. Sometimes you don’t go for a simple reason—you caught the flu. Sometimes you don’t go for a more complex reason—you underperformed in key stress tests and scenarios. That’s done so that the team that does go into space is the very best it can be, and that includes being able to complement each other’s strengths and weaknesses.”

“You firmly believe there’s more than one Apprentice, don’t you?”

“Yeah, I do. Let’s face it, twenty people is a lot. Sure, we have a professional assassin out there who’s working for the C.I.A. But I can’t think of a better way to make someone prove loyalty to me than to have them kill someone on my order.”

“The Mob’s been using that philosophy for decades,” Chuckie said. “And it’s been working for them for decades, too. So, you think Eugene was trying to be an Apprentice?”

Michael’s example made things seem so much clearer that I could answer this question. “No, not Eugene. Pia. Pia was in training to be an Apprentice. She has all the aspects you’d want—security clearance, job with the C.I.A., already a double agent.”

“She’s dead,” Christopher pointed out.

“Because she failed,” Jeff said. “She had Eugene set up to kill Ed Brewer. But he killed Santiago instead. And he told Kitty about her and the robotics packet she’d given him.”

“So, either someone at Gaultier killed her for leaking that, or the Master killed her.” Wasn’t sure if I preferred Master versus Mastermind versus Sith Lord. Decided I could worry about this later. “But if we take Michael’s theory to the farthest reaches, I think that begs two important questions.”

“Who are the others vying to be the next Sith Apprentice?” Reader suggested.

“That’s one. And the other is this—why is there competition for this slot in the first place? Or, phrased another way, which Apprentice, or Master, did we take out during Operation Destruction?”