Alien Collective (8 page)

M
OM SMILED
and turned to me. “Yes.”

“So, have you found more of them, or are you still deciphering whatever Gladys gave you before she and I went on her suicide mission to Guantanamo?”

“You’ve raised such a good daughter,” Olga said. “I’m sure you’re very proud.”

“Wow. Compliments. I’ll preen later, when I’m sure that wasn’t sarcasm.”

“It wasn’t,” Olga said reassuringly.

Mom rolled her eyes. “True, but it took you long enough.” She squeezed my hand. “Yes, I’m proud of you. Always. Now, continuously necessary reassurances that you’re still your mother’s favorite taken care of, you need to consider why everything is happening today.”

“Wait, what do you mean I’m still my mother’s favorite? I’m your only child. Who else would you favor? I mean, aside from Amy, Chuckie, Sheila, and Caro? Well, and James and Christopher. And probably Jeff. And, of course, Jamie. Anyway, moving on before you actually answer those questions, I want to know what you got from Gladys before I do any more mental calisthenics.”

Mom shot Olga a long-suffering look. “See what I mean?” Olga chuckled. I managed to refrain from comment. Mom turned back to me. “Fine. Gladys didn’t find much in the short time she was working on Project Kindred Spirit.”

“
Love
that code name.”

“
So
glad you approve. I was losing sleep over the thought that you might not like it.” My mother’s sarcasm knob went well past eleven. “Anyway, because of Mahin, we knew we couldn’t just use heartbeats as an indication of potential.”

A-Cs all had two hearts. Hybrids—those with an A-C and a human parent—had human genetics dominant for the outside and A-C genetics dominant for the inside. This meant that every hybrid had two hearts. At least, that had been the conventional thinking.

Only Mahin, whose mother had been a regular human woman but whose father had indeed been Ronald Yates, only had one heart. But she could move at hyperspeed, though she hadn’t known she could until she’d been recruited by Al Dejahl.

She also had impressive talent which she had known about since she was young—she could move dirt around. This sounds like a big “so what” until you’re saying so what when Mahin’s moving twenty tons of sand at you and then the reaction is a lot more like “Oh God, oh God, we’re all gonna die.”

Shortly after Operation Infiltration had ended Tito had shared that Mahin wasn’t technically correct for a standard hybrid. Chuckie and Mom had allowed him to test the three other Yates Offspring they had in custody and, sure enough, they all had single hearts, too.

All we’d come up with was the fact that Yates was, in genetics terms, a sport. There was nothing predictable about how his genetics would transfer to someone else, meaning that each mother’s genetics had a potential to create very different children, much more so than a normal horndog man’s spreading it around would account for.

“Weird abilities and the potential for hyperspeed would seem to be likely options.”

“Oh, thank God you’ve come,” Mom said, sarcasm knob heading toward at least twenty on a scale of one to ten. “It’s amazing how easy it is to ask every single person within a forty year range if they’ve ever run at supersonic speeds or can do something odd. We should be done with our initial questioning in about three hundred years, give or take a decade.”

“Wow, too much caffeine, Mom, or just wishing you were already at the Mossad Homecoming Party?”

“Both. At any rate, we’ve made very little progress. Charles suggested that it’s high time you got involved.”

“Me? Really?” Wow. At least Chuckie respected the skills.

“Yes. He feels that your, and I quote, ‘random abilities and exceptional capacity to find trouble’ will be invaluable.”

“I’m touched. Why have you waited a year to get me involved?”

Mom sighed. “Because Charles has been very . . . focused . . . on this. It’s taken him time to adjust to the idea that he can’t do this all himself.”

“Oh. Why did you let him?”

Mom shrugged. “He needed the outlet, and finding these people isn’t as vital as everyone thinks. At least not as vital as keeping Charles focused on something other than despair. We could afford to wait for him to come around to the idea that it was time to ask for help.”

“Why didn’t he just come to me about it?”

“Because I needed to do it alone,” Chuckie said from behind me. “For a while at least. Yes, Angela, I was eavesdropping.”

Mom laughed. “That’s your job.”

“Yeah.” Chuckie rubbed the back of his neck as he looked at me. “Mad at me?”

I hugged him. “No. You know I’m here if you need me.”

He hugged me back. “Yeah, I know.” He let go of me and cleared his throat. “Cliff and Vander don’t want the two of us to go anywhere alone together until we have the Bruce Jenkins situation under control.”

“Well, you’re living at our Embassy, so that can only work so well, but whatever.” Due to a variety of factors, Chuckie’s apartments in D.C. somehow always getting ransacked by our enemies and Naomi’s death being the two biggest, Jeff had put his foot down and insisted that Chuckie take a permanent guest room at the Embassy, at least for a while. I’d taken this to mean that Jeff was worried that Chuckie was on the edge of suicide or murder, though Jeff had refused to confirm such. Or deny it. “Though, frankly, I don’t know where we’re really living right now.”

“No one’s going into the American Centaurion Embassy for, most likely, at least another twenty-four to forty-eight hours.” Chuckie grimaced. “Buchanan and William have Field teams searching the tunnel systems around every Centaurion base or stronghold worldwide, and that’s going to take some time, hyperspeed or no hyperspeed. Crawford and the rest of Airborne are overseeing the cleanup and everyone’s triple-checking everything, so again, taking a while.”

“No argument from me. I don’t want anyone dying from this, any of us especially. But where are we all going to go? Dulce? The Pontifex’s Residence? Or was that attacked as well?”

Chuckie and Mom stared at each other. “No,” Chuckie said slowly, “there was no activity at all around the Pontifex’s Residence.”

“Are we sure it’s safe? Or, let me put this another way. Are we sure there’s not some horrible thing—bomb, assassins, intolerant religious assholes—lying in wait for Paul and James to go home?”

C
HUCKIE AND MOM
both pulled out their phones and started making calls. Olga smiled at me. “We are going to be staying with the Czech diplomatic mission. Andrei and the rest of our mission are there already. I’m sure you could house with Bahrain and Israel.”

“I’m sure we could. I’m just worried about us bringing down trouble onto our friends. More trouble, I mean, since all of our neighborhood’s been evacuated. Because of us.”

“No,” Olga said sternly. “Because of a variety of evil people. Not because of you.”

Examined her expression, because that had sounded like an Olga Clue and I didn’t want to miss it if it was. She looked just slightly expectant. Always the way.

“You think it’s the usual two, three, or four plans going at once, don’t you?”

She shrugged. “If you examine the events from a distance, they don’t seem overly . . . coherent.” She looked at the TV, then back at me.

Decided to take the leap. “Gotcha. They’re being triggered by the same thing, though, aren’t they? Jeff’s sort of announcement as Armstrong’s VP.”

She nodded. “Your husband would be my choice out of all the options.”

“You’ve mastered the art of making every sentence have at least a double meaning, haven’t you? I’m, as always, impressed.”

Olga laughed. “It is, as you say, a skill I’m proud of.”

Mom got off her phone. “I’m going to send Kevin and a team over to the Pontifex’s Residence.” She strode off, Chuckie following her, though he was still on his call.

Adriana rejoined us. “Grandfather wants to know when we will be joining him.”

“Not just yet,” Olga said. “I would like to be sure that things are . . . quiet.”

Adriana nodded. “I believe it would be helpful if you could reassure Representative Martini that his accepting the nomination would be in everyone’s best interests.” It was clear she was talking to Olga, not me.

“Are you coming with us?” Olga asked as Adriana took hold of her wheelchair.

Had an overwhelming urge to talk to someone who wasn’t going to make it hard on me or stress me out. “Ahhh . . .” Now I just had to figure out how to say that I wanted alone time more than I wanted to reassure my husband, somehow without earning major Bad Wife Points.

Prince had been snoozing with the other K-9 dogs. However, as I tried to come up with a smooth exit strategy, he got up, trotted over, and wuffed quietly.

Prince loved me and Jeff as much as he loved Officer Melville. I knew this because since those drugs had altered Jeff, they’d also altered Jamie, and, due to my giving birth to her, altered me. I’d gotten some of the nifty A-C abilities, like hyperspeed and faster healing. And I’d also gotten my own special talent. I could talk to animals. Sort of. If they wanted to communicate with me, that was.

Prince usually wanted to share the wonder that was Our Special Bond, so I was quite clear that, as far as Prince was concerned, if I wanted some alone time, then he was going to be with me and we would be alone together. He was like a canine Buchanan, but I didn’t share that with either one of them, because I wasn’t sure if they’d be flattered or insulted.

I was also quite clear that Prince didn’t actually need to go but was enthusiastically willing to work as my distraction. He was great that way, and much easier to convince to go along with my plans than any of the men, particularly Buchanan.

“Oh, you want to go for a walk, boy? Sure thing. I think I’d better let Prince relieve himself,” I said to Olga and Adriana. “I’ll take him out back.”

“Enjoy yourselves. We will tell everyone where you are should they be searching.” With that, Adriana wheeled Olga off and, thusly covered, Prince and I headed for the doorway. No one seemed to notice. Good to see how Vital to the Cause I was.

I’d been here before and knew my way to the back. As with most of the embassies around town, there wasn’t a huge backyard. However, there was an outside patio with some grass along the enclosure’s walls and that was good enough for what I wanted.

“Can I help you, Ambassador?” One of Mona’s many retainers had spotted us.

“Oh, I’m just heading out back to walk the dog. So to speak.”

“I can do that for you,” he offered. I didn’t know him, but this meant absolutely nothing. I didn’t know half of the Field agents I’d met over the years or the many politicians in town I’d been introduced to, sometimes more than once. My not knowing someone on Mona’s staff was low on the Surprise-O-Meter.

Like all the others on staff he was dressed impeccably. He was reasonably attractive, though he didn’t really look like Mona or Khalid, and he certainly didn’t look like Oren, Jakob, or Leah. But all that meant was that he wasn’t Israeli and wasn’t from the same regions Mona and Khalid were.

Upon closer inspection he looked sort of European, with dark hair and eyes and olive skin. Then again, this meant nothing, really. With this so-not-rare coloring he could be Middle Eastern or Italian or American or half a dozen other nationalities, all things considered. He was vaguely familiar, so I assumed I’d seen him here before.

However, regardless of where he originally hailed from, I didn’t want company for this little trip, company I didn’t know in particular. “Oh, Prince is picky. Aren’t you, boy?”

Prince knew a cue when it was offered. He bared his teeth and gave a low growl.

“Ah. Well then, would you like me to accompany you?” He was dedicated, I’d give him that. Whoever he was. Wondered for a moment if he was a spy or an enemy, but how would he have gotten in? The Bunker District embassies all had massive amounts of security, and the Bahrainis were no slackers in this regard. Especially today, I’d have to figure no one was getting in without a lot of Proof of Citizenship and so forth.

“Nope, I’m good, thanks.” Headed off, Prince still growling. Suggested he calm it down, in my mind. Yeah, I could talk to the animals both verbally and mentally. Dr. Doolittle had nothing on me. Jeff’s excitement about this particular skill knew no bounds.

Got to the back door and went outside, making sure the door was unlocked so we could get back inside without issue. Prince finally stopped growling, so that was good. Checked behind me. It was a glass door—bulletproof, of course, but still, glass—which made it easy to see that the Helpful Servant was still there, watching me. Maybe he didn’t trust me.

Couldn’t argue about this concern—after all, I had people all around me who trusted pretty close to no one. Wouldn’t be a surprise that Mona had more than Khalid hanging about to cover the watching for suspicious activities.

Prince and I trotted around for the sake of faking out the guy watching us and maneuvered ourselves to a spot where we couldn’t be easily seen by anyone inside, Mr. Helpful Servant specifically. The ten-foot block walls protected us from random lookieloos to the sides and back.

However, if someone was up high enough, they could see us. A-Cs had improved eyesight over humans, and I’d backward-inherited some of that. Scrutinized the area. Didn’t see anyone looking out of any windows, and the only person acting suspicious I could spot was me.

“Okay, I think we’re alone and unobserved, unless you spot something.”

Prince wuffed that as far as he could smell, the coast was clear. Then he pointedly looked around. I knew what he was suggesting. And asking. Go me.

“Yeah, yeah, I’m on it, I’m on it. Poofs and Peregrines, please assemble.”