Alien Diplomacy
“You’re doing a great job, Serene. This transition’s been hard on everyone. But I don’t think I’d get more out of this than you and the entire Imageering team have.”
Serene looked up and gave him a brave little smile, but she did look a bit more like she had earlier. I decided giving Serene a Girl Power lecture, suggesting we just call it a day and deal with whatever tomorrow night, or asking that we all get our old jobs back would probably be tactless, stupid, and useless, respectively. We needed to think, ergo, I needed to talk.
I forged on. “Based on everything we know, Peter and his partner are either related or bestest buds, or maybe the only two survivors from their village. But Peter cares enough about his partner to have let Nurse Carter live. We saved both of them, remember.” Which reminded me. “Jeff, what’s the story on Peter’s body?”
“It was gone when we got there.” Jeff sounded angry and worried. “Nurse Carter opened every freezer, no Dingo. Or his partner, but we knew that already, since he never made it inside.”
“No.” Tim shook his head. “He made it inside. All of Airborne was there, we watched. The agent teams assigned might have been turned away by what they thought were D.C. cops, but I guarantee both prisoners were checked into the hospital.” The three flyboys nodded their agreement again.
“Only one prisoner came in,” Nurse Carter stated for the official record. “Believe me, I looked for the Dingo’s partner. I never found him, and I would recognize him. All the records I saw indicated one prisoner, only, as well.”
I looked at Chuckie. “So we can be absolutely positive the C.I.A. is involved.”
CHAPTER 43
C HUCKIE GAVE ME A LONG LOOK. “Not that I’m arguing, but how do you figure? Right now, it could be any of the Alphabet Agencies.”
“True, but we both know this sounds more like the C.I.A.’s style. Don’t they have that death drug?”
“That’s the movies.”
“ You were the one who told me about the death drug, when we were in high school, and you said it was real.”
“Maybe I was misinformed.”
“Right.” I stared him down. He stared back. I narrowed my eyes. He tried not to laugh. This earned a quiet growl from Jeff. “Time’s wasting,” I said finally.
Chuckie sighed. “True enough. Yes, we have such a drug, and yes, field agents use it on a somewhat frequent basis, and yes, I’m not supposed to acknowledge that we have it, let alone to a room full of people. Happy?”
“Relieved. Would have hated to have your perfect conspiracy record blemished.”
“Near perfect,” he correct.
“Right, you were wrong about where Hoffa was buried. Where is —”
“ If you could go on with the situation at hand,” Mom snapped.
“Fine, fine. So, the C.I.A. took the Dingo Dog’s partner and altered the records so it appears that he was never there. He was hurt but not that badly, so I think we can safely assume he’s alive. The question is, did they use the death drug on the Dingo, or did they kill him for real and just remove his body to tidy up?”
“No idea,” Jeff said.
“I did check him, and he seemed legitimately dead,” Nurse Carter said.
Chuckie shook his head. “If they did use the drug, it’s incredibly effective. No insult to your skills as a nurse intended, but it’s unlikely you’d have realized it was a fake unless you knew the exact signs to look for.”
“And I don’t,” Nurse Carter admitted. “So we don’t know if he was really dead or not.”
Len nodded. “We all searched, and Mister Joel Oliver took a lot of pictures, but there was no way to verify if they took a real dead body or a live one.”
“All the other bodies were there,” Kyle added. “Only his was missing.”
“Okay, so we’re at a semi-dead end until we go through what he left for me as next of kin and figure out what the message means. So, time to get some other information. Mom, Chuckie, the supersoldier project—it’s clearly being run out of Paraguay. I know what happened yesterday is a part of it. But is the superbeing formation we had in Paris a scant three months ago part of it, or is it a different set of lunatics trying to create the ultimate killing machines?”
Chuckie looked at Mom. Mom gave him the “oh what the hell” sign. He looked back to me. “Based on information we gained during the infiltration—”
“You mean Operation Confusion, right?”
Everyone I could see other than
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