Alien in the House

as well as Jeff did them, but I made do. Of course, I didn’t have to give Olga or Adriana any fancy greeting other than a big hug, but I did pull out all the stops and give Olga’s husband, Andrei, a decent curtsey. Hey, he was the Romanian ambassador and his wife and granddaughter kept me informed and, in at least one case, alive, so I figured he deserved a good showing from me.
    “Don’t Get Mad, Get Even” from Aerosmith was playing. “Excellent song choice,” Olga said with a wink. “I heartily agree with the sentiment.”
    As our local neighbors headed to the main room, “Ray Bands” by B.o.B came on. Jeff winced. I ignored it. I had a nice tune from ELO coming right after this one, and that’d teach him for telling me that I had to have some bands other than Aerosmith playing during this party.
    Sure the song was about someone trying to get goodies based on another person’s fame. But that was appropriate for D.C. Besides, it was especially fitting considering who I could see on our near horizon.
    Sure enough, the invitees that excited me the least were here—the Cabal of Evil had arrived.



CHAPTER 12
    I DIDN’T WANT HALF of these people in my home, but Cliff had overruled any and all objections with a very simple point—these people were important enough that slighting them would cause us far more problems than if we just played along and pretended to like them. He’d been saying this to us for months, and we’d listened and played along and, honestly, liked a few of them now. But not all of them.
    Of course, many former members of the Cabal of Evil were dead or in prison, all thanks to us. Our importance in the grand scheme of things was proven by the fact that the rest of the Cabal went on as if their former members’ deaths or imprisonment had merely been unfortunate circumstances we’d had no choice but to help facilitate. Washington, it really had the best people.
    It also had pretty much all the same people it had had before Operation Destruction. What Pierre called our New World Order was simple, but somewhat scary as well. This year was supposed to be an election year, for the House and a third of the Senate. However, due to the massive alien invasion, and terrifying proof that there was a lot of life on other planets—much of it paying attention to Earth—the President had requested that elections be suspended.
    It was unprecedented and, per many protesting groups, unconstitutional, but the President wasn’t asking for total control. No one was sure Earth wasn’t going to be invaded again tomorrow, and the President wanted to ensure that the U.S. government remained stable. And that meant keeping anyone who was holding elected office in place an extra two years, which was when his second term would be ending anyway.
    Shocking everyone, Congress and the governors of all fifty states agreed. Most of the countries worldwide were doing the same thing. This probably had a lot to do with what the “visiting dignitary,” also known as King Alexander from Alpha Four, had said when he was cleaning up the intergalactic mess. Alpha Four was all about stability, and Alexander had definitely shared that he didn’t want to have to come right back with his huge space battle cruisers and explain the Alpha Centaurion position to new folks any time soon.
    So protests happened, we were blamed or praised, depending—but mostly blamed—and everyone who’d been elected stayed elected. All of them seemed happy about the extension of power and being able to stave off a re-election campaign for another year or so. But my hopes of one or more of the Cabal losing their seats were definitively dashed. Always the way.
    As usual for the Cabal, they all arrived together. Operation Destruction had shifted power in the group, however. Senator Vincent Armstrong had moved from Senator Being Somewhat Manipulated to Big Man on Cabal Campus. He’d made this move because he’d aligned himself with us. That Armstrong owed us favors, as we did him, was something I’d managed to accept over the past few months, albeit unwillingly.
    Accepting that Armstrong was planning his run for the Presidency wasn’t as hard, because I’d realized that was coming during Operation Destruction. Armstrong had become an extremely pro-alien politician over the past many months, meaning he was considered a Friend of American Centaurion, title totally implied and important. We needed friends, and powerful ones were, these