Alien in the House

involved?”
    “No. I think we need to put guards on Edmund Brewer. I think he’s going to be the next one targeted.”



CHAPTER 62
    W E GOT INTO THE ELEVATOR NOW. While we went up to the fifth floor I sent Officer Melville a text asking about any officer named Dier. Requested he keep the search confidential, just in case Dier was a legit dude and it was simply a common name around these parts. Also asked for a list of any officers named Reid, just in case.
    Exited the elevator to find all of Hacker International present and accounted for, along with Amy, Jeff, and the others who’d been with us at the Embassy.
    “Took you long enough,” Christopher said.
    “We were figuring out what’s going on.”
    For this statement I received Patented Glare #4. “I told you we’d found out what’s going on over at Gaultier already.”
    “Right. Where are the Barones?”
    “Sent them on an errand,” Jeff said. “And I’ve explained to everyone here that, even if they’re engaged to one of them, this is confidential in the extreme.”
    “I won’t tell Jennifer anything,” Ravi said. “But she’s completely trustworthy.”
    “Other than in her taste in men,” Amy said under her breath.
    Stryker handed Chuckie a thick folder. “Here you go, my lord and master. Be happy American Centaurion bought us better equipment than we had at Andrews, because you’d still be waiting for the printouts otherwise.”
    “Whine later,” Chuckie said. “Expect to work right now. Henry, you seem happy.”
    He did. It was probably safe to consider that Dr. Wu looked close to giddy. Point of fact, I’d never seen him looking this cheerful, and that included the few times he thought he’d found a girl willing to go to bed with him. He’d been wrong those times, so I was cautiously optimistic about his joy being something ultimately useful.
    “Proximity equals access, Chuck,” Henry said. “And a twenty-petabyte external hard drive, courtesy of the Dulce Science Center, means we now possess every bit of information Gaultier Enterprises has.”
    “Nice work. What’s a petabyte?”
    Henry shot me a withering look. “It’s a term for data storage capacity.”
    “Dude, I guessed that, based on the fact that I know what a terabyte, a gigabyte, a megabyte, and a kilobyte are. I know what an octet is, too—it’s the smallest, the thing that makes up a byte. So we can stop with the idea that Kitty Cannot Grasp Our Genius Speak. However, I thought terabytes were the biggest things going.”
    “They are for regular use,” Omega Red said. “But a petabyte is made up of a thousand terabytes.”
    “It’s the next inevitable phase,” Big George added.
    “Works for me. So, Doctor Condescending Wu, what did you find? We know you found Eugene’s laptop.”
    Henry took a deep breath and Christopher put his hand up. “The highlights. We’re on a schedule now.”
    Henry shot Christopher his own glare, though he had a long way to go to even hope to touch the hem of Christopher’s Glaring Garment. “Fine. I was able to use the laptop to access the entire system. We’re running the data right now to identify anything related to deep space suspended animation.”
    “What are everyone’s initial thoughts—are we going to be able to help Malcolm?” Prayed the answer would be yes.
    “Yes,” Stryker said. “I believe we have enough in here to be able to figure out what he was hit with and, therefore, what to do to bring him out. We’re sending relevant information to Dulce and Doctor Hernandez.”
    Allowed myself to feel cautiously optimistic again. Everything going on was making it easy to focus on something other than worrying about Buchanan, but now that we were talking about him, all the worry showed up to kick cautious optimism to the curb while sharing that there was no proof Stryker was right or that we’d find a cure. Or that Buchanan would ever wake up again.
    Jeff came over and put his arm around me. Clearly I was broadcasting the worry. Did my best to pull myself together—I wasn’t going to help Buchanan with worry.
    “What else did you find?” Reader asked.
    “There are three hidden floors in the building,” Amy said. “I’ve been there before and didn’t know about them, but Henry found them on the schematics.”
    “Did you explore them?” Chuckie asked.
    She shook her head. “We couldn’t get in, at least not on this trip.”
    “We have the building blueprints,” Henry said. “All of