Alien Diplomacy (30 page)

“It is classified, and you’re not cleared for it,” Mom said with a resigned sigh.

“I’ve spent the past two days with people trying to kill me and all manner of weird going on. Frankly, if anyone deserves to know what the hell is going on with Paraguay, it’s me.” I stood up. “However, fine and dandy, you all don’t want to tell me, for whatever reason. So, no worries. Instead of you telling me, I’ll tell you. You can correct me when I’m wrong, but I’m pretty sure I’m right.”

Mom leaned her head on her hand. “Go to town, kitten.” I recognized the expression on her face. I decided not to share that, as far as I could tell, my mother was testing me. Again. Oh, well, she liked to ensure the skills were kept up to snuff. And this way, she could legitimately say that neither she, Kevin, nor Chuckie had told me anything.

I looked at Nurse Carter. “You’re supposedly Paraguay Secret Police.” She nodded. “And you’re investigating what’s happening to your poorest citizens.” Another nod. “And yet, your intel runs from extremely sketchy to downright wrong, you’re working as a real nurse, and you didn’t kill me or anyone else when you had the chance.”

She looked uncomfortable. “What are you driving at?”

“You’re no more Secret Police than I am.” Reader coughed. “Okay, scratch that. I’m more Secret Police than you are. What I really think you are is someone who lost a loved one to the supersoldier program I freaking know some lunatic’s running in the middle of the Chaco.”

Her mouth dropped open, but she snapped it shut. “You’re wrong.”

Chuckie was trying not to laugh. Mom had an expression I was really used to on her face—her “you’re so busted, but please, do continue to dig your hole deeper” look. It was one of her classics, honed to perfection throughout the years.

“What you are is someone who has some skills and followed some leads, and you’re in way, way over your head. Your government isn’t going to ask for you back, because your government isn’t aware that you’re here undercover doing the work they aren’t interested in doing. Your government is either trying to handle this on their own or, very possibly, approves of the supersoldier plan and is using
Aliens
as a blueprint.”

“That was a good movie,” Tim commented. “But the monsters weren’t controllable. What would make anyone think a superbeing could be controlled?”

“I have one word for you: Mephistopheles. I also point to yesterday’s odd superbeing cluster right there in the Chaco again and say trust me on this one. So, Nurse Carter, what’s your take? Is your government fully behind the idea of Aliens: The Next Generation?”

“Not everyone in the government,” she said quietly.

“Just like here. How nice, we have something in common. So, since you knew who he was, what’s the story on my ‘uncle,’ Peter the Dingo Dog?”

“Dingo Dog?” Mom stared at me, then her head snapped toward Nurse Carter. “Are you saying that the man who tried to kill Kitty was the Dingo?”

Nurse Carter nodded. “Yes.”

“Just who is the Dingo? I mean, I’ve heard some wacky names in my time, but his takes the prize.”

“He’s an assassin,” Mom said.

“Him trying to kill me all day yesterday, and telling me he was hired to do so, were sort of a tip-off for that one, Mom. I meant, why does he have that particular nickname, and why are you so much more freaked now than you were before you heard his name? Oh, and either he was faking his voice or he’s not from Australia.”

Mom heaved a sigh. “He’s not. No one is sure where he’s originally from. We have no pictures of him. Peter Kasperoff might not be his real name, but most sources say he’s from the former Eastern Bloc somewhere, most likely KGB trained. He got the nickname because he’s like a vicious wild dog.”

“A loyal dog,” Nurse Carter added.

“A loyal dog you knew, accurately, when you don’t have any of your other facts really straight. So, what’s your connection to the Dingo?”

Nurse Carter shook her head. “There is a dossier on him. I was able to read it before—” She stopped herself and slammed her mouth shut.

“Look, either we’re all friends here or we’re going to have to lock you away. Right now, whoever you want avenged or whatever wrongs you want to right, we’re probably your best hope for achieving that. So spill it.”

Chuckie cleared his throat. “Right now, you’re in deep trouble. Prove yourself helpful, and I can make all those troubles disappear. Refuse to cooperate, and I’ll have to show you that the C.I.A. really is staffed with the nastiest people on the planet.”

I didn’t actually think Chuckie was going to take Nurse Carter away to torture her in unspeakable ways, but from the way she blanched, it was clear she did. She nodded slowly. “He killed the doctor at my hospital who asked too many questions.”

“You witnessed this?” Chuckie asked.

“Yes.”

“Then how is it you’re alive? I mean, he told me he didn’t like to kill pretty girls or babies, and you’re not barking, but if you could identify him, why let you live?”

Nurse Carter swallowed and looked down. “When the first gunshots came, I and two other nurses, we hid with the dead bodies in our morgue. He and his partner killed everyone. They didn’t find us. The authorities said it was terrorists. But we heard them, before we hid ourselves, when they were talking to Doctor Rijos. They wanted information he had on the…project. He refused to tell them where it was. So they…they killed everyone.”

“So no one could pass the information along,” Chuckie said. “Thorough and effective, albeit overkill. And sloppy.”

“Sloppy?” Christopher asked.

“Three women escaped,” Chuckie said calmly. “If you’re supposed to kill everyone, not checking the morgue is sloppy work.”

“You do that kind of work?” Nurse Carter asked, sounding suspicious and afraid.

“No,” Mom answered. “Our jobs are to stop people from doing that kind of work.”

“And,” I reminded everyone, “we now have less than a day to do it.”

C
HUCKIE SMILED AT ME.
“Oh, I’d like Nurse Carter here to explain how she survived, however.”

“I just did,” she said.

Chuckie shook his head. “I’ve read the file on the Dingo. He isn’t sloppy. Leaving not one, not two, but three nurses alive by not checking the morgue is sloppy. I guarantee he checked. So either you’re lying, or you’re his accomplice and you’re here to infiltrate us.”

She looked like she was going to argue. Chuckie shook his head again. “I’m a very patient man. You’ve used up all the patience I’m willing to spare. Tell us the truth, the whole truth, or so help me God, I’ll make you wish the Dingo
had
killed you.”

His expression was calm, but his eyes were icy. She took the hint. “His partner was injured, badly, by some local police who were there when they started killing everyone. When they found us hiding, I offered to help him. We patched him up, and they let us go.”

“Why?” Mom asked. “That seems kind, but stupid.”

“I don’t know. He…he said it cleared his debt.”

“That makes sense.” Everyone looked at me. “Oh, come on! This is why he passed information to me and made me his next of kin. We’d saved his life, and his partner’s life, after they’d tried to kill us. He couldn’t let me live, right, because we had the upper hand. But he could give me what he knew I wanted, which was who hired them and who they were going after. Speaking of which, any progress?”

“It was heavily encrypted,” Serene said. “But we broke it and
completed the decipher just before I needed to come over here.” She didn’t look happy. She did, however, look a lot less like, as Reader put it, our Ditz in Residence and a lot more like one of Centaurion Division’s key personnel. It was nice to see that the promotion had been good for her. So another one of us was blossoming in their new role, even under pressure; it was a small victory, but I was willing to take it.

“And?”

Serene shook her head. “One sentence: The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.”

There was dead silence. “That was it?” Chuckie asked finally, clearly voicing everyone else’s thoughts.

“The disk was corrupted, most likely from the water, but so far as we can determine, there was only that one sentence on it.” Serene clearly felt she was failing at her job. There was far too much of that going around right now.

“What the hell does that mean?” Jeff asked.

Mom’s brow was furrowed. “It’s the first line they teach you when you’re learning to type. At least, it was. Who knows how you learn these days.”

“It’s still used, Mom. I learned it.” The A-Cs and half of the humans looked really confused. It was easy to tell who was a self-taught typist in the room and who wasn’t, not that I thought this was going to help us in even the smallest way. “It’s a pangram—it uses every letter of the alphabet. You type it so you learn where every letter is on the keyboard.”

“We intercepted a typing tutorial?” Reader sounded less than thrilled.

“It was handed to me, and the Dingo Dog didn’t want anyone else to know I had it.”

“Maybe he gave it to you to confuse you,” Kevin suggested.

“No,” Tim said. “If that were his goal, he could have just told Kitty whatever he wanted. I was in the helicopter, and we were watching. I never saw him pass that to her, so he did it so no one else would know.” Hughes, Walker, and Jerry all nodded their agreement.

“So that means it’s a message.” Chuckie sounded as though he was heading for a migraine. I hated that, because it always indicated we were clueless, and I
really
hated that.

Something else was bugging me. “Serene, you said this line was encrypted?”

“Yes. A very complex encryption. It also had to be translated.”

“Excuse me?”

She shrugged. “The original sentence was in Russian, written in Cyrillic. We had to have Moscow Base do translations.”

“And you’re sure those were a hundred percent correct?” Christopher asked.

Serene nodded. “Yes, it was checked and verified at least ten times. Mostly because no one at Moscow Base could believe this was the entire message.”

“It means something to someone. And it was important enough to encrypt. Or else the Dingo Dog really feels learning to type is a high-priority assignment.” I sighed. “Well, at least we know something. And that he’s loyal. Or weird. Or both.” Probably both. “He also said that he wasn’t one of the guys in the taxis, and since he was already ‘dead’ when I saw them last, he was likely telling the truth.”

“Did he give you anything on them?” Chuckie asked.

“He said they were amateurs and didn’t want to harm the merchandise.” I saw a lot of stressed out expressions. “I know. That doesn’t really give us much help at all.”

“This is the most information we’ve had, girlfriend,” Reader reminded me. “But we’re no closer.”

“Maybe we are. I heard Peter and his partner talking—well, shouting—in a foreign tongue right before we went into the Potomac. I guarantee that wherever Peter’s from, his partner is from there, too. Considering Serene just said this fab message came out in Russian, let’s figure this confirms Mom’s intel that they’re from somewhere in the former Soviet Bloc.”

“We couldn’t determine country of origin,” Serene said. “We tried, in case we were translating incorrectly. But the sentence is too short to show any kind of regional inflection.”

“And it’s an American sentence, which would mask it even more.”

Serene looked down. “I’m sorry. I’m better with explosives. Maybe…maybe Christopher should take a look. In case I’ve…missed something.” I saw the confidence she’d been showing only minutes earlier start to fade away. I didn’t want that to happen, but I had no idea what to do or say, especially if Christopher agreed with her.

I looked over just in time to see Jeff shake his head almost imperceptibly at Christopher. “No,” Christopher said quickly. “You’re doing a great job, Serene. This transition’s been hard on everyone. But I don’t think I’d get more out of this than you and the entire Imageering team have.”

Serene looked up and gave him a brave little smile, but she did look a bit more like she had earlier. I decided giving Serene a Girl Power lecture, suggesting we just call it a day and deal with whatever tomorrow night, or asking that we all get our old jobs back would probably be tactless, stupid, and useless, respectively. We needed to think, ergo, I needed to talk.

I forged on. “Based on everything we know, Peter and his partner are either related or bestest buds, or maybe the only two survivors from their village. But Peter cares enough about his partner to have let Nurse Carter live. We saved both of them, remember.” Which reminded me. “Jeff, what’s the story on Peter’s body?”

“It was gone when we got there.” Jeff sounded angry and worried. “Nurse Carter opened every freezer, no Dingo. Or his partner, but we knew that already, since he never made it inside.”

“No.” Tim shook his head. “He made it inside. All of Airborne was there, we watched. The agent teams assigned might have been turned away by what they thought were D.C. cops, but I guarantee both prisoners were checked into the hospital.” The three flyboys nodded their agreement again.

“Only one prisoner came in,” Nurse Carter stated for the official record. “Believe me, I looked for the Dingo’s partner. I never found him, and I would recognize him. All the records I saw indicated one prisoner, only, as well.”