Alien Proliferation

have a Nine Lives mix.” I took a look. “Oh, man, I am such an idiot. Tim expected me to go for my iPod a lot sooner, I’m sure. He must have made this mix. Jeff said the Poofs were freaking—bet he told Poofikins to make sure I saw my iPod.” The first song was ‘Nine Lives.’ The other songs from the CDs he’d identified as clues were there. But there were other songs, too. “Damn. He expected me to listen to this and catch on. And we don’t have the time.”
    “Titles might spark something.”
    I put one earpiece in my ear and one into White’s. “Let’s have a listen.” I scrolled through “Help!,” “Time to Get Ill,” “She’s Crafty,” “Friend or Foe,” “Material Girl,” “Levon,” “Tiny Dancer,” “Traffic and Weather,” “I-95,” “Cinderella Undercover,” “You Can’t Always Get What You Want,” “Runaway,” “Dr. Wu,” several others. We listened to snippets of the songs. Some of this made sense, some still didn’t.
    I looked at White. “I don’t get it. He took the time to put other bands in here—Oingo Boingo, the Stones, Steely Dan, geez, even Dion. But he didn’t give me their cases or CDs as clues. Why not?”
    White considered this while I scrolled through the songs again. “Perhaps he feared someone would break the code if they had all the music.”
    “But he was pursued by A-Cs.”
    “Was he?” White looked around. “We stand in the middle of a parking garage. My people don’t normally do their business in underground parking garages. However, I’ve seen many movies, and humans love to do covert business in underground parking lots. Why, I don’t know.”
    “Because you can’t see well. So you could fool someone into thinking you were someone else, like the head of the ETD, if you were in the right place.” I stared at the music mix. At one title in particular. Hit play. “Oh, wow. You know . . . we have a mole.”

 
    CHAPTER 55
     
    “Y OU’VE BEEN SAYING we didn’t have a mole. I agree that we do, just pointing out that you are contradicting yourself.”
    “Yes, because I thought this was only a money play. But it’s both—one partner gets money, one partner gets power.”
    White looked at the songs. “I don’t know most of these, other than by association with you. However, that title sounds promising.” He pointed to “Cinderella Undercover.”
    “Yeah. We’re listening to it. Check the chorus.”
    He was quiet. “Cinderella undercover, workin’ for the C.I.A. Truly, rock music at its finest. Who’s Cinderella? In this situation, I mean.”
    “Cinderella is our mole. Gaultier’s partnered with the C.I.A., which makes sense in an odd way. They protect him—the P.T.C.U. has no idea of what he really does, ETD is kept in the dark about him, too—and he gives them what they want—the A-C War Division—and everybody makes money.”
    “Mister Reynolds is the mole?”
    “No. He’s a target. So the question is, is she an enemy or a double agent?”
    “Who?”
    “The person Tim realized was the mole. I’ll bet he saw her around Christopher’s isolation chamber. She could go in, but she shouldn’t have been there. Maybe she used the official name for the drug, maybe she talked to Clarence in too familiar a manner, maybe he saw her fiddle with Christopher’s grid down there. And because no one but me likes Chuckie, he wanted only me to know—if Chuckie’s not involved, I can protect him. If he is involved, then I can set Jeff on him. Also, if we had one mole, how many others might we have? Clarence is a traitor, who else, right? Tim bet on the side of major infiltration and got out to be able to do something to save the day.”
    “Not following you. At all.”
    “Why was Camilla my doctor? I don’t know her, and Tito, who’s essentially an intern, ran everything. Why did Chuckie even mention her as a possible mole? He didn’t want her to know I’d turned superpowered, but he also said she could be the mole—why? If he knew for sure, he’d have arrested her. So she triggered some memory in him. I’ll bet he’s seen her at C.I.A. headquarters and didn’t remember consciously. And Tim wasn’t in the room then, so he had no way of knowing if Chuckie was the one who put her in place or not.”
    “Camilla is our mole?” White asked hopefully.
    “Yes.”
    He sighed. “Not happy, just relieved to know. She was originally stationed out of East Base and was moved to Dulce right after Operation Drug