Alien in the House

overlay or similar onto a person? So that, say, I could be furious and ready to kill someone, but all an empath would feel was that I was happy and thoughtful?”
    “I’d think so,” Ravi said.
    “Absolutely,” Stryker chimed in. “It’s already been done, in that sense, with the androids.”
    “But the androids had the full range of human emotions. Jeff was able to find them based on things like murderous rage.”
    Big George shrugged. “So what? They were last year’s model.”
    “We found them this year.”
    “It’s a figure of speech, Kitty,” Big George said. “And you know it.”
    Henry chimed in for the first time. “You always strive to achieve more, Kitty. To make something more effective, smaller but more efficient, and so forth. Think of cell phones. The first ones were bricks. Now you can get tiny ones, and even though the trend is going larger again, they’re sleek and thousands of times more powerful than the first models.”
    “And they’re always coming out with new models.”
    “Right. Every six months or faster. So, you see—”
    I recognized Henry going into lecture mode. “Selling past the close, Doctor Wu. Cease now, I’m on board.”
    He snapped his mouth shut and gave me a dirty look. “You don’t catch on as fast as you like to pretend.”
    True enough tonight. But I wasn’t going to tell him that. “Oh, blah, blah, blah.” Looked around. Omega Red was intent on his Braille keyboard and didn’t seem to be paying attention. “Yuri, your thoughts?”
    He didn’t reply, but his fingers kept on moving,
    “Yuri. Yuri Stanislav. Omega Red. Dude with the sunglasses on—what are you working on? Or are you asleep? Just please don’t be dead, I’ve had enough of that tonight.”
    “Just a minute, Kitty,” he said absently.
    “Time’s wasting, Yuri. We are busy people with a lot of horrible conspiracies to identify and thwart.”
    “Really?” Big George sounded incredibly thrilled.
    “Really, but I want Yuri to chime in on our bug situation.”
    “I haven’t been paying attention to that, Kitty,” Omega Red said without any shame in his tone whatsoever.
    “Are you kidding me? Why not?”
    “Because I’ve been doing something else. It’s related, so calm down.”
    “Tell me what you’ve been doing that’s related and I’ll think about not kicking you.”
    “You won’t kick me, and not just because I’m blind and that would be wrong. I think I’ve found the company that’s created something very similar to what you described.”
    “The bug or the overlay?”
    “Both.”
    “Awesome. Let me guess, Titan Security.”
    “No. Gaultier Enterprises.”



CHAPTER 34
    “I T SO FIGURES.”
    As I said that, it occurred to me that there was one person I hadn’t seen since I’d escorted Reyes to the bathroom—Amy.
    Camilla looked at me. “Is Amy Gaultier-White around?”
    Resisted the impulse to ask if Camilla was a mind reader. “No idea. Com on!”
    “Yes, Chief?” Having the communications and sound system hooked into the Zoo had been costly, but oh so worth it.
    “Walt, do you have any idea where Amy is?”
    “No, Chief. She’s not on premises.”
    Fabulous. “Any idea when she left?”
    “No, Chief, I’m sorry, I don’t. It was chaotic for a little while. Do you need me to see if Dulce can track her?”
    “That’s okay, Walt. I’ll just call her.”
    “Yes, Chief.” The com went quiet.
    Pulled out my phone and dialed. Amy didn’t pick up. Called a few more times, all of which went to voicemail. Sent a text. No reply. “This is too reminiscent of Operation Confusion,” I said under my breath.
    “Yes, it is,” Camilla said. Dang, she’d heard me. “We need her tracked down, immediately.”
    “There could be a good reason for why we can’t find her.”
    “There could be. There could be some very bad reasons, too.” Camilla’s expression softened. “I know she’s one of your closest friends. She was a patsy before. Whether that means she was good enough to fake us all out, is a patsy again, is running down a lead, or is in mortal danger, we don’t know. And we won’t know until we find her.”
    “I know. I just . . . Christopher’s not here right now.”
    “So? She’s his wife, so either she’s faked him out, or she could be in trouble. Either way, we need to know. Make the call.”
    Heaved a sigh. Hated it when the right thing to do seemed counter to what a good friend would do. “Com back on.”
    “Yes,