Alien Diplomacy

telling me he was hired to do so, were sort of a tip-off for that one, Mom. I meant, why does he have that particular nickname, and why are you so much more freaked now than you were before you heard his name? Oh, and either he was faking his voice or he’s not from Australia.”
    Mom heaved a sigh. “He’s not. No one is sure where he’s originally from. We have no pictures of him. Peter Kasperoff might not be his real name, but most sources say he’s from the former Eastern Bloc somewhere, most likely KGB trained. He got the nickname because he’s like a vicious wild dog.”
    “A loyal dog,” Nurse Carter added.
    “A loyal dog you knew, accurately, when you don’t have any of your other facts really straight. So, what’s your connection to the Dingo?”
    Nurse Carter shook her head. “There is a dossier on him. I was able to read it before—” She stopped herself and slammed her mouth shut.
    “Look, either we’re all friends here or we’re going to have to lock you away. Right now, whoever you want avenged or whatever wrongs you want to right, we’re probably your best hope for achieving that. So spill it.”
    Chuckie cleared his throat. “Right now, you’re in deep trouble. Prove yourself helpful, and I can make all those troubles disappear. Refuse to cooperate, and I’ll have to show you that the C.I.A. really is staffed with the nastiest people on the planet.”
    I didn’t actually think Chuckie was going to take Nurse Carter away to torture her in unspeakable ways, but from the way she blanched, it was clear she did. She nodded slowly. “He killed the doctor at my hospital who asked too many questions.”
    “You witnessed this?” Chuckie asked.
    “Yes.”
    “Then how is it you’re alive? I mean, he told me he didn’t like to kill pretty girls or babies, and you’re not barking, but if you could identify him, why let you live?”
    Nurse Carter swallowed and looked down. “When the first gunshots came, I and two other nurses, we hid with the dead bodies in our morgue. He and his partner killed everyone. They didn’t find us. The authorities said it was terrorists. But we heard them, before we hid ourselves, when they were talking to Doctor Rijos. They wanted information he had on the…project. He refused to tell them where it was. So they…they killed everyone.”
    “So no one could pass the information along,” Chuckie said. “Thorough and effective, albeit overkill. And sloppy.”
    “Sloppy?” Christopher asked.
    “Three women escaped,” Chuckie said calmly. “If you’re supposed to kill everyone, not checking the morgue is sloppy work.”
    “You do that kind of work?” Nurse Carter asked, sounding suspicious and afraid.
    “No,” Mom answered. “Our jobs are to stop people from doing that kind of work.”
    “And,” I reminded everyone, “we now have less than a day to do it.”



CHAPTER 42
    C HUCKIE SMILED AT ME. “Oh, I’d like Nurse Carter here to explain how she survived, however.”
    “I just did,” she said.
    Chuckie shook his head. “I’ve read the file on the Dingo. He isn’t sloppy. Leaving not one, not two, but three nurses alive by not checking the morgue is sloppy. I guarantee he checked. So either you’re lying, or you’re his accomplice and you’re here to infiltrate us.”
    She looked like she was going to argue. Chuckie shook his head again. “I’m a very patient man. You’ve used up all the patience I’m willing to spare. Tell us the truth, the whole truth, or so help me God, I’ll make you wish the Dingo had killed you.”
    His expression was calm, but his eyes were icy. She took the hint. “His partner was injured, badly, by some local police who were there when they started killing everyone. When they found us hiding, I offered to help him. We patched him up, and they let us go.”
    “Why?” Mom asked. “That seems kind, but stupid.”
    “I don’t know. He…he said it cleared his debt.”
    “That makes sense.” Everyone looked at me. “Oh, come on! This is why he passed information to me and made me his next of kin. We’d saved his life, and his partner’s life, after they’d tried to kill us. He couldn’t let me live, right, because we had the upper hand. But he could give me what he knew I wanted, which was who hired them and who they were going after. Speaking of which, any progress?”
    “It was heavily encrypted,” Serene said. “But we broke it andcompleted the decipher just before I needed to come over