Alien Diplomacy

better. Two of them, however, were dressed in expensive clothes and looked like they were in charge. I reached in, grabbed both of them by their throats, and pulled them out of the car.
    A-Cs were stronger than humans, and I’d inherited that from Jamie, too. I held on and dragged them with me as I ran toward where Jeff and Christopher were. I flung the smaller one to Christopher. “Hang on and use him as a shield.”
    Dragged the larger one in front of Jeff and held him there. “Keep shooting, hit your bosses. Try to hit or run us over, and we’ll just break their necks!” This time, I knew I sounded like my mother. OrI sounded scary crazy. Either way, the bullets stopped, and everyone backed away.
    “Run and I kill them. Move and I kill them. Are we clear?” I waited. No one said anything. “Well? Dudes, you choosing that I kill them and you too?”
    The man I was holding cleared his throat. “You told them not to move.” He had a slight accent. I couldn’t place it, but it didn’t sound American in any way. He also didn’t sound the way the taxi driver had, disguised voice or not.
    “Whatever.” He was right, but why give him the satisfaction of agreeing? At least his minions were well behaved and good at following orders to the letter. “Jeff, hold the trash, will you?”
    “Sure, baby. Let’s see who we have here.” He turned my captive around. “No one I know.”
    “Hang on.” I walked at human speeds to Christopher and looked at his captive. “No clue. Hang on again.” Trotted to the limo. “MJO? I think we need you. Bring the cameras. Len, Pierre, stay in the car with Jamie. Kyle, come and gather up all the guns. I want them in the trunk of our car.”
    Oliver and Kyle followed me out of the limo. Kyle started removing weaponry. “You want them tied up?”
    “Yes, but we have nothing to do that with.” A thought occurred to me. What we needed was a pickup, and not the truck kind. “You know who they are?” I asked Oliver quietly.
    “No,” he said just as quietly, while he took snaps of every single person. “They’re foreigners, and they’re likely to use the diplomatic immunity card based on their license plates.”
    I remembered the lugs in the last car and ran over. They were still sitting there. “Really? Weapons on the ground, butts with the rest of your goon squad, or we kill your bosses.”
    “Do what the crazy woman says,” the guy Jeff was holding called.
    His goons dropped a lot of firepower on the ground, then left their limo. I did a fast headcount. Yeah, there was no way we could handle all these people. I took a closer look—none of them were overly impressive in the looks department, meaning they were all likely to be humans. I ran back to our car, dug my phone out, and dialed. She answered immediately. “Mom, are you busy?”
    “Only watching a bizarre car chase on the news James insists you didn’t start.”
    “I didn’t! They chased us. But that’s why I’m calling. We have a lot of bad guys sort of in custody, and I need someone to tell me what to do with them.”
    “Why did you call me instead of Charles?”
    “I think they’re involved in whatever’s going to go down at the President’s Ball, and I figured you’d want to know. Geez, you always complain when I don’t call you before Chuckie.”
    “It’s just a shock. What’s going on?”
    Wow. That was a good question. I honestly had no idea. “Well, Mister Joel Oliver thinks they’re after me, because they tried to blow us up using Jamie’s car seat, but I think they’re after him, because they were shooting at all of us, but that was after he was with us. Though I also think there’s a lot more going on than we’ve figured out yet, especially because I don’t think the taxis are involved in this part of whatever plan’s going down. The police presence in D.C. seems nonexistent. And the traffic around here beyond sucks.”
    “Someone shot at my daughter and tried to blow my granddaughter up?” I hadn’t realized Mom could sound scarier than I’d heard when I’d come in way too late from a date without letting her know. Apparently, she could. “I’ll be right there. Call Charles, I want him there, too.”
    “How do you know where our ‘there’ is?”
    She sighed. “I’m tracking you via the GPS in your cell phone. Charles will track you using the tracking implants Centaurion Division has in all of you. Why would you even feel the need to ask? Other than the fact