Alien in the House

of people. You always need someone to be your interface, at least if you’re going to hide in shadow, but you don’t necessarily need a lot of people.”
    “Yeah, your underling could be the head of the crime syndicate, but he’d be the only one who knew who you were.”
    “It seems farfetched to me,” Jeff said.
    “So do aliens living on Earth and yet here you are.”
    My phone received an automated text from Caroline: “In a locked-door meeting, will respond when able. Happy Holidays!” So much for getting answers from that source. Bit the bullet and sent a text to Armstrong.
    The com came on. “Excuse me, Chief,” Walter said. “But Mister Dane has asked me if you’re awake. Are you? Awake to him, I mean.”
    “Yeah, Walt, patch him through here.”
    “Kitty?”
    “Hey, Stryker, what’s up?”
    “We’ve found some things I think you’re going to want to know about right away. Walter said he was going to patch Chuck in, too.”
    “Okay. You guys are still up?”
    “The slave driver won’t let us rest,” Stryker said bitterly.
    “I heard that,” Chuckie said over the com. “So whatever you woke us up for had better be good.”
    “Oh, it’s good. Okay, first off, Dulce just let us know that they’re confident they’ve identified what Mister Buchanan was hit with and they’ll have the cure ready in a couple of hours.”
    “That’s great news!”
    “It comes with a couple downsides, Kitty. The waking up process is slow, which is for the safety of the ‘sleeper,’ so it’ll take about twenty-four hours for Buchanan to come back to full consciousness. But that’s not a side effect, that’s just the way the cure has been designed.”
    “Okay, that’s not the end of the world.”
    “This will be, in that sense. Per everyone at Dulce, and based on what we’ve found in the information from Gaultier, the drug has one major side effect.”
    My throat felt tight. “What is it?”
    “Short-term memory loss. We’ll get him awake and he’ll be fine, but he’s not going to remember anything that happened to him from about thirty minutes before the drug hit him.”
    “Fabulous,” Chuckie said. “So Buchanan won’t be able to tell us who attacked him, where he was when he was attacked, or anything else related to the incident, including who he was or wasn’t with.”
    “Nope. It was considered a worthwhile side effect, since the idea was that all the recipient would be forgetting was going to sleep on a long-range spaceship.”
    “Why does it affect memory?” I asked.
    “Near as they can tell, it’s because it slows the aging process, and that affects the brain as well as the body. That’s the best we have, so focus on the happy that your guy will be back among the conscious by Christmas. We hope.”
    “Yeah, okay, I’ll take the loss of intel to have Malcolm back alive and hopefully well. I’m sure, in the long run, he’d rather lose those thirty minutes than the rest of his life and all his training.”
    “Anything else?” Chuckie asked.
    “Yeah. We’ve hacked into all the police departments that work D.C. and the surrounding areas. We’ve also hacked into the F.B.I.”
    Was suddenly incredibly glad Cliff had chosen the Hear No Evil, See No Evil, Don’t Have To Tattle About Evil plan.
    “And?” Chuckie asked, sounding tired and impatient. Couldn’t blame him.
    “There was a body in the car that exploded today. They’ve managed to make a DNA match.”
    “That’s awfully fast,” Chuckie said.
    “Yeah, well, that’s because the dead woman’s in the system. Because she worked for the C.I.A.”
    Jeff and I looked at each other. “Well,” I said. “So much for us getting to interview Pia Ryan.”



CHAPTER 76
    “H OW’D YOU KNOW?” Stryker asked.
    “Our luck runs no other way, Eddy. So, do they think Pia was the one who set the bomb or do they think she was dead before the bomb went off?”
    “They don’t have enough to be able to guess. They’re lucky they can identify the body at all. The blast was huge and burned hot. She had some weird dental work, which was all that was left of her.”
    “Dental records can be faked,” Chuckie said.
    “We’ve done her background check, Chuck. Unless someone altered all of it in advance of this, that was her in the car.”
    “Now what?” Jeff asked.
    “Now we all go back to bed,” Chuckie said. “Though I should probably ask why you two sound so wide awake.”
    “There are five of us here, actually,