Alien Diplomacy (24 page)

“Well?” Chuckie asked.

“More bugs planted. Ten of them, in fact.”

“So, we’ll neutralize those and prepare ourselves for more impromptu visits. That covers the really obvious. But I haven’t been around Cantu, Armstrong, or Cartwright for them to bug me. So who does the nonmatching bug that’s only on me belong to?”

Chuckie said. “No idea. I have another question, though. What is it everyone who bugged both of you wants to know, and do they know it already or not?”

“T
HAT’S TWO QUESTIONS, REALLY,”
I pointed out.

“Oh, pardon me, Miss No Exaggeration Allowed,” Chuckie replied with a grin.

“Missus,” Jeff snapped.

“Boys, don’t start. And we can’t really answer your questions yet, Chuckie, though my guess is no, or we wouldn’t have been visited by The Gang of Ten.” But it did remind me of a small, but I felt important, point. “Why did Peter call me Miss Katt?”

“Isn’t his name Pierre?” Kyle asked.

“Yes, but I’m talking about a different Peter. This one is one of the ones who tried to kill us all day yesterday.”

“No idea,” Chuckie said. “Hopefully Serene’s team will find something on that memory card.”

“Think our visitors and Peter are connected?”

“Maybe,” Chuckie allowed. “But if so, the bigger questions would be which one of them is behind the assassination attempt, and who do they want to kill?”

“I hate it when you ask the hard questions. Over and over again.”

“Give me a hard answer and make all our lives easier.”

“When the light dawns for me, you’ll be the first to know.”

Traffic was a lot calmer than the day before, and we made it to the Georgetown University Medical Center in decent time. I checked my watch. Jeff had given it to me for my birthday—it was top of the line, extremely waterproof, and all the other bad things proof, so it was still working. Nurse Carter had called me about an hour and thirty minutes ago. I hoped we hadn’t taken too long to get here.

We parked and had the “do we leave the limo unattended or not”
argument. Chuckie and Jeff wanted Len and Kyle to stay with the limo. I didn’t want to separate our group. Jeff compromised, called Reader, and a set of A-C agents came to do parking garage duty.

The six of us trooped in and found Nurse Carter without too much trouble. She was middle-aged, seemed in pretty good physical shape, and, as her voice had indicated, looked Hispanic, though I couldn’t say if she was Mexican, Cuban, or something else. She was also quite brisk.

After I showed my ID and explained that Katt was my maiden name, thankfully shown on my driver’s license, which read Katt Martini, she managed a fleeting smile. Apparently it was
the
smile for middle-aged women in Washington. “Well, Miss Katt, thank you for coming down so quickly.” She looked at the men with me. “Oh, were those other men really your employees? If so, I’m sorry, we can’t break protocol.”

“Employees?”

“The men who came by about an hour ago. They said you’d asked them to claim your uncle’s things, but we have strict rules here. They weren’t on the list, I’d already contacted you, and you are the one who has to claim the deceased’s belongings.”

I’d moved from Peter’s random friends and family list up to niece status in less than two hours. I wondered if I stalled a bit if I’d end up his wife or daughter. “I didn’t send anyone.” I looked up at Chuckie, who shook his head. “No one should have come here other than me.”

“Then, I wonder who they were?” she said absently, as she went into a locked room at the nurse’s station. She came out with a clipboard. “Come with me, please.”

“What did the men who tried to get my uncle’s things look like?” I asked her as we walked briskly along to the elevators.

“Like businessmen, like your friends,” she indicated Chuckie and the boys, not Jeff or Oliver. She looked at me sharply. “Why would someone try to claim your uncle’s things illegally?”

Since he wasn’t actually my uncle, technically I was claiming illegally. But apparently Peter had wanted me to so claim, so it was, therefore, legal. My small moral quandary over, I checked her expression. She looked suspicious. This probably wasn’t good. “Huh. I have no idea. Maybe they were my uncle’s rivals.”

“Oh. Business or politics?”

We were in D.C., it wasn’t an insightful question so much as covering the likely bases. “Both, I think.” The elevator arrived, and we got in and headed for the basement level.

“Well, we certainly don’t want to cause an international incident here.” Nurse Carter gave a nervous titter. “Trust me, we ensured your uncle’s things were protected. His personal items are in the vault.”

“The medical center has a vault?”

“Absolutely. We get many dignitaries here. We don’t want anyone…untoward…taking advantage of them while they’re ill or injured.”

Interesting. So Nurse Carter was used to shadowy people trying to snag other people’s property. “These other men, they didn’t have any paperwork that would have given them clearance, did they?”

“You mean like a warrant? No. I would have contacted you if that had been the case.”

“How did you get anything of my uncle’s in the first place?”

“Oh, every patient’s belongings are bagged and tagged when they arrive. He requested his things be sent to the vault, after asking that we be sure to notify his next of kin of his predicament.”

So Peter had been aware of the kind of security the medical center had. “Do all the area hospitals work the same way?”

“Of course.” The doors opened, and we trailed Nurse Carter as she wound her way through the rat maze of corridors. They weren’t too brightly lit—not dim but not really typical medical bright white light, either. Presumably because there weren’t patients down here. We ended up at a room with a Security kiosk in front of it.

The guard reminded me of our A-C Security teams. Not that he was gorgeous, far from it. But he was big and had that totally bored yet totally alert at the same time thing going on.

He and Nurse Carter exchanged some sign and countersign stuff that seemed amazingly complex for a hospital, then he allowed her inside. I started to follow, and he put his hand up. “Only the nurse.”

She looked at me. “Miss Katt can come in. The gentlemen need to wait outside.”

“I’d like to go with my wife,” Jeff said. He sounded worried. And annoyed that she was still calling me Miss. I was accepting that, for whatever reason, a wedding ring, driver’s license with my married name on it, and my husband and/or baby with me weren’t convincing some people that I was marriageable material.

“She’ll be fine,” Nurse Carter said reassuringly. “If she gets emotional, I’ll get her right back out to you.”

I knew Jeff wasn’t worried about my sobbing over my “uncle’s” things. I figured he didn’t like the idea of us separating this way. I couldn’t blame him. Then again, if this was how they did things at
the D.C. hospitals, making a fuss would draw a lot of unwanted attention.

“I’ll be fine.” I squeezed Jeff’s hand and followed Nurse Carter into the vault.

The door closed behind us, sounding very loud and very emphatic. The lighting was fairly dim, like the rest of the floor. Apparently they liked to keep it creepy in their basement. How Stephen King of them.

With that cheery thought in my mind, I followed Nurse Carter to the back of the vault, where there was a bank of what looked like safety deposit boxes. She inserted a key into one, opened it, pulled out a bunch of stuff in a long tray, and put it down on the table nearby.

“Now,” she said, as she turned around, took a nasty looking handgun out of the tray, and pointed it at me, “why don’t you tell me what the hell is going on?”

T
HIS WAS SO TYPICAL FOR MY LUCK
that I didn’t even comment on it. “I have no freaking idea. Who the hell are you? And why the elaborate ruse to get me down here?”

Her eyes narrowed. “It’s not a ruse. Why did the Dingo put you as his next of kin?”

“The Dingo?” I’d heard some amazing nicknames by now, but this one was in the running for World’s Worst for sure.

She shrugged. “It’s his name in the business.”

“What business, the assassin business? You guys have a union or something?”

“Yes, the assassin business, and I’m not in it.”

“Right. That’s why you have the big gun pointed at me.”

“I don’t like taking chances.”

“So, you moonlight in nursing and kill people at the same time? That’s convenient.”

“I haven’t killed anybody. Today,” she added, apparently for truthfulness.

“Great. I haven’t either. I’m willing to start with you, though, if you don’t get that gun out of my face.” This was bluster on my part. Hyperspeed did nothing for you if the bullet caught you, and she was close enough that I wasn’t sure I could get out of the way in time.

“Why did the Dingo put you as next of kin?”

“Again, I have no freaking idea. I don’t make up these plans. I just get caught up in them and have to figure them out before everyone I care about gets killed. Why do you know him as the Dingo and who the hell are you?”

She studied me. “I’m with a…secret organization.”

“Wow, me too. What’s the freaking name of your secret organization?”

“What’s the name of yours?”

“Oh, for God’s sake.” I had to figure Jeff had picked up what was going on by now. “My husband’s going to break down that door in a moment, and then you’re going to have a lot more to worry about than secret handshakes and tricky passwords.”

I looked at the stuff in the tray. None of it looked familiar. None of it looked waterlogged, either. “How the hell did Peter or the Dingo or whoever the hell he was give you all that stuff, and, more importantly, how is it that none of it looks like it took a swim in the Potomac earlier?”

“These things were with him when we checked him in. He didn’t say they weren’t his. And he was quite specific that he only had one living relative in town. So why are you listed as his next of kin?”

“I’m assuming because we saved his life.”

“Why? You’re working with him?”

“No. You know, my husband asked me that, too, why I wanted to save his life. So did everyone else. I can’t tell you why, I just didn’t think it was right to let him and the other dude who spent all day trying to kill me drown. Not, I have to mention, that I have a problem killing the big bad fuglies, at least under most circumstances.”

“What other ‘dude’?”

“The other guy who came in with Peter the Dingo Dog Man. There were two of them, both admitted. I saw them get strapped onto the gurneys myself.”

“Shit.”

“Excuse me?”

“There was only one admitted. That means they took the other one.”

“Who is ‘they’?”

“Our enemies.”

“When you say ‘our,’ do you mean enemies of yours and your secret organization’s, enemies of mine, or enemies of both of us?”

“Yes.”

“I’m really considering the benefits of just hating your guts right now.”

Nurse Carter cracked a smile. “I can understand that.”

I decided to just go for it. “Look, is this about the assassination attempt that’s going to happen at the President’s Ball?”

She stared at me. “What? What are you talking about?” She seemed genuinely confused. It so figured.

“Oh, great. So, since you seem unaware of that, let’s just identify what the hell plan you’re working on, for, or against, shall we? Just so I can sort of keep it straight.”

She blinked. “What are you talking about?”

“That’s exactly what I’m asking you. Let me speak slower—what the hell is going on, and why are you still pointing a gun at me?”

Nurse Carter seemed to reach a decision. “I’m with the Paraguay Secret Police. I’m investigating dangerous alien activity in our country. We’ve traced the ones in charge back to people in your government.”

“When you say ‘my’ government, which one do you mean?”

“How many governments do you work for?”

“Technically? Um, I’m honestly not sure. The lines get blurred and all that.”

She stared at me. “You
are
Angela Katt’s daughter, aren’t you?”

“I might be.”