Alien Diplomacy

trained us to handle it when we were teenagers.
    I took a deep breath. It was shaky, but I shoved the hysterics away. Because Chuckie was right—I couldn’t help Jeff if I was a mess. I nodded.
    Chuckie let go. “We can get out in a few seconds. Then we’ll find him, get him to medical, and it’ll be all right, Kitty. I promise.”
    As the ringing from the explosion subsided, there was another sound. It reminded me of metal creaking. Big metal creaking in the way it does when it’s been stressed too much and isn’t going to be holding on much longer. “I know that sound. That’s a bad sound.”
    “Let’s get Jeff and that stupid dog and get the hell out of here,” Tim snarled.
    My hand was heading for the door handle when it opened. Prince was flung in and on top of me, meaning White was on the bottom of our dog pile this time. The door slammed shut. “Kid, do what the Head of Airborne said, and get us the hell out of here.”
    Prince was lifted off me and placed rather gently on the floor. Jeff shoved everyone into seats and pulled me onto his lap. Kyle was on the intercom, passing along the “leave now” orders.
    Len floored it and raced off, the other limos hightailing it out of there with us, as chunks of concrete started falling. They bounced off of the limos. The taxis weren’t so lucky. I hoped Ishmael and his crew had good auto insurance.
    Jeff looked fine, a little mussed up, but there was no blood I could see. I did the whole pat-down thing. Nothing seemed broken, out of place, wet, or otherwise harmed. “You’re alive.” I managed to say this without bursting into tears. Just barely.
    He hugged me. “I’m okay, baby. And so’s the dog. Who’s too brave for his own good.” Jeff patted Prince’s head where he thought I couldn’t see. “I was able to get us behind a bearing wall away from the blast. My ears are still ringing, and I’d bet his are, too, but otherwise, we’re just fine.”
    I looked behind us. The garage was collapsing. “There were more bombs, besides the grenades they tossed in for us, weren’t there?”
    “Yeah, baby, there were. They rigged every floor. Triggered, as near as I could tell, by the bombs on our floor.” He shook his head. “You called it right, I think. Whoever’s targeting you realized the former cops were getting too close.”
    “I think it’s because they did their thing at the Paraguayan Embassy after sniffing around Titan, but we can hash it out at home.” My body started to shake, and Jeff hugged me tighter. I leaned against him, listening to the sound of his double heartbeats, and allowed myself to tremble—my heart was definitely racing more than his. After a bit, his double heartbeats soothed me as they always did and my body began to relax.
    “What are we going to do with them?” Kevin asked as we barreled for home as fast as the traffic would allow us. The other limos were coming along, sticking close, not that I could blame them. Conveniently, we did have plenty of underground parking.
    “They can room with their hero, Mister Joel Oliver. They can sleep in the Jolly Green Giant’s underground chamber. They can be detained in Dulce, at East Base, or NASA Base. But they are not going home, because if they do, they’re dead, and we all know it.”
    “I’ve run their backgrounds,” Kevin said. “All of them are single, either never married, widowed, or divorced. None have a live-in girlfriend or partner, either. Have put protection onto the ex-wives, none of whom live in or around this area. None have children.”
    “That’s a really odd statistic.”
    Chuckie nodded. “It is. We’ll dig a little further, but if we’re talking a dozen men with no wife or partner at home, that’s indicative of a carefully selected team.”
    “I have a feeling they were doing more than standard K-9 stuff when they were on the force. Which may be both why they were cut and why their Chief let them keep their dogs.”
    “Not that they’re overly impressive,” Tim muttered.
    “Not by comparison to what we’re used to, I’ll give you that. But for guys who seem to have limited resources, they did okay.” I was shaken up, but not stupid. Ishmael’s guys had fooled us all, more than once so far, and we weren’t the only ones. “Chuckie, how many Embassies do you think actually fell for their gas leak routine?”
    “From what my teams told me, all of them other than Romania and, clearly, Paraguay. Our team was not allowed into