Alien in the House

will kick their asses if they’re not here in two minutes.”
    “Yes, ma’am.”
    “You want the extra hands or just to make them suffer?”
    Amy laughed. “Both. Besides, spotting anomalies is supposedly one of the many things they’re good at. Let’s see if that’s so.”
    “Check inside innocuous things,” I suggested as we all started to sort through Santiago’s stuff. Well, everyone other than Tim, who was texting like he was a teenager talking to his newest crush. “Santiago hid that paper in a pretty odd spot.”
    “That’s why he wanted you to clean out his desk,” Reader said. “Because he figured you’d find it.”
    “We took everything, including the trash,” Raj said. “Just in case.”
    Four-fifths of Hacker International arrived, all looking annoyed, at the same time as Oliver and the boys returned. Amy told them what to look for—anything that might help—and everyone started pawing through and sorting Reyes’ stuff.
    “Before you tell them where we’re at,” Tim said, nodding to our new arrivals, “let me give you the latest from Mossad. Leventhal Reid had no siblings, at least as far as the information shows. However, he ‘adopted’ a younger boy when he was home from college. It’s a heartwarming story, really. Supplemented his parents’ incomes so they could house and raise the kid, sent him to school, everything.”
    “That seems far nicer than I’d ever have thought Reid could be.”
    “Well, here’s where the story starts to sound like the man we knew and loathed. Reid’s parents weren’t rich, but they had good investments and really good life insurance. They died in a car accident. The police found it suspicious but couldn’t prove anything. Reid inherited a small fortune, just in time for his first major political campaign. And the ‘brother’ fell off the radar.”
    “So, Raul’s first assignment was to kill off the people who’d helped raise him?”
    “Leventhal Reid was a psychopath,” Chuckie said. “If he found a kid he wanted to raise and train as his own, the smart money is on him finding another psychopath.”
    “And, going along with Chuck’s theory, it sounds like Reid paid his parents to care for the kid,” Kevin said. “So the kid probably had no love or loyalty for them.”
    Tim nodded. “Mossad agrees with Chuck, and I agree with Kevin. They also found records, records that have been sealed and hidden, that show the kid took the legal name of Lars Reid, changed from Raul Diaz. Which is nice and close to Dier, isn’t it?”
    “I guess Raul’s getting a double out of that. So how is Mossad finding all this?”
    “Remember Leah? She was at the dinner party?” We all nodded. “She’s in Florida, digging through old court records.”
    “How did they know to go down there, let alone what to look for?”
    Tim shrugged. “Per Oren, Mossad has a strong interest in Raul, because he’s killed a variety of their operatives over the years. We told them he was one of our main suspects, they did the math.”
    “Strong interest means they want to kill him,” Chuckie said.
    “That’s nice. So do we.”
    “No,” Gower said. “Actually, we don’t.”



CHAPTER 84
    “W E DON’T WANT TO kill the assassin?” Jeff asked. “Why not?”
    “Because right now the person who’s most likely able to identify who the Mastermind is would be Raul,” Gower explained.
    We enjoyed a long moment of silence. “I’ll let Mossad know,” Tim said as he went back to his texting frenzy.
    “Good catch, Paul. No killing Raul until we get who took over for Reid out of him. Okay, so Mossad’s confirmed what we suspected there. What about a girl? There was a female Dier serving, or not serving, water at our party, too.”
    “There’s no female relative that they can find, for either Reid or Raul, other than the mother who’s dead,” Tim reported. “And Bernie, who Buchanan killed.”
    “So was she legit and just has a weird spelling of the name?” Christopher asked.
    “That seems like too much of a coinkydink to me.”
    Vance shrugged. “What’s hard about this? Dude’s found a new woman.”
    Chuckie nodded. “Sound theory and it makes sense. He was used to working with his wife.”
    Tim continued to text. “They’ll look into new known female associates. Raul’s not on radar a lot. If he was, he’d be dead. He was released from custody a lot sooner than any of us knew, by the way, and right before Mossad could take him