Alien Diplomacy

bugged both of you wants to know, and do they know it already or not?”



CHAPTER 32
    “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