Alien Diplomacy

knew all the best dudes.
    After the Pentagon’s little “we love Titan” paragraph and a typical “wonderful suppliers and people” quote from Cartwright, I found the wife’s name. Cybele Siler Marling, who had also been, per this article, “a weapons genius in her own right,” had died years before. Twins, a boy and a girl, were mentioned but not named. According to the article, they’d died when his wife had.
    “Um, yeah. Interesting. Hers especially. Very French. Or something. So, his wife and kids are supposedly dead.” I looked over at Olga. “Any guess as to which one of them is really alive and working as a politician in Washington?”
    Olga shook her head. “The only other thing I know of Mister Marling is that he is very fond of visiting France and Paraguay. And that he might have children the press is not aware of in both of those countries and here. Or he might not.”
    Maybe he was more like Yates than I’d first thought. “So it could be anyone. Or no one at all. Great.” Story of our lives these days.
    “You may keep the paper,” Olga said graciously.
    “Um, thanks. I think.” I folded it up and shoved it into my purse. “So, Paraguay, France, Titan…is there a connection we should be making?”
    “The men in the taxis,” Olga said, looking at me, “what did they tell you?”
    I held back the sigh I wanted to heave as Olga sent us off onto yet another tangent. “That they were friends and we should trust them and go for a ride somewhere. Oh, and the driver said his name was Ishmael.”
    She nodded. “Didn’t something strike you as odd about what they did?”
    “Everything they’ve done and said so far has struck me as odd. This isn’t our first encounter with them.”
    “I see.” She looked, quite pointedly, at Chuckie, who was really doing a good job of not looking impatient with Olga’s pussyfooting around.
    My brain kicked. “They left when Chuckie came.” I looked back at Olga. “That’s what you mean, isn’t it?”
    “Yes. Your new young men have firearms on their persons, do they not? So the drivers would not have run because your Mister Reynolds was coming with a gun.” I didn’t even ask how she knew Chuckie and the boys were packing heat. Either she could see the outline or she was making an extremely educated guess.
    She looked at me expectantly. Great, another mother-type testing me. I wondered if my mom had sent a memo out or something asking anyone who ran across me to really make me work for it before giving me any necessary information.
    But, since I was my mother’s daughter, I was trained to actually think when the test questions appeared out of nowhere in the middle of dire circumstances.
    I considered what Olga had and hadn’t said. It was clear to me that she knew a lot, if not everything, about what was going on. But she didn’t want to come out and say whatever. So she was protecting herself, which made sense. However, she wanted us to know, so she was likely dropping hints we were missing.
    I looked at Chuckie again. She seemed to feel he was key. He looked back at me. “Chess?” he asked rather hopefully.
    “Probably. It always is. But I can’t be sure if we’re playing one game with one really sneaky opponent or speed chess with a whole lot of lesser players. And I have no idea what pieces are where, let alone who either side’s king really is.”
    Sure, the current working hypothesis had Esteban Cantu as the head of Operation Assassination, but that didn’t mean he actually was —he could be working for the real big bad fugly, and, based on all the very high-level things that were going on, most of which seemed above Cantu’s pay grade, it was likely we hadn’t identified that person yet. So, until we knew who that was, we had no idea of what was happening on our opponents’ chessboards. And we still had less than no idea of who our side’s king was.
    I was proud of myself for thinking of all of this silently, and Iknew without asking that Chuckie was the happiest man in the world that I’d so managed. But basically, all I’d done was confirm for myself that we were still pretty much nowhere. Go me.
    I sighed. “Len and Kyle didn’t get much more than we did, but should we have them come over?”
    Olga coughed discreetly. “Oh, I’m sure the new young men would enjoy Adriana’s company and she theirs. But I’m sure they’re too new to matter in this discussion.”
    She was using the word “new” an awful lot,