Alien Tango

No first name.”
    “Oh.” Reader was quiet for a moment, staring at the folder. “Ten to one that would be Leventhal Reid, head of the House Subcommittee on Terrorism.” He looked up from the file. “And, for the record, he knows about us and hates our guts.”
    I wondered if this was the same Reid my parents had mentioned at dinner and bet that it was. “Is he also on the House South American Policy, Joint National Security, and House Immigration committees?”
    Reader nodded. “He’s got a lot of clout, in a lot of areas, all of which affect us.”
    “Figures.” I’d never heard of him before last night, but this didn’t surprise me all that much. I was more of a pop culture, as opposed to political, follower. I knew what Brad and Angelina were up to, not so much what was going on in areas that actually affected me. My mother wasn’t the only one who found this more than a little annoying. “What agency asked us to come out to Florida in this odd manner?” I asked Gower.
    “Richard wouldn’t tell me,” he admitted. “But I think it was high enough up that he had to acquiesce. And this arrangement was their idea, not Richard’s.”
    “Reid’s got a lot of influence,” Reader said. “I’d bet he used it to do this.”
    “Why would he?” Kevin was back and had heard this exchange. “Not saying he wouldn’t, by the way. He’s a nasty piece of work. But it seems risky.”
    “Not if we’d blown up.”
    “We have to prove a threat first,” Martini said. “We have nothing if there’s nothing wrong other than Kitty being overly suspicious.”
    “Good point. Here’s what we’re going to do. We’ll search each person, pilots and crew included. We’ll line up—James, Paul, and me on the left, Tim, Christopher, and Kevin on the right—and we’ll have them walk between us.”
    “What’ll I be doing, knitting?” Martini sounded peeved.
    “No, you’ll be standing behind us, looking genial.”
    “Why?”
    “Because the six of us will be looking carefully at each person. Tim and James will pull out the obvious suspects. Christopher and Paul will pull out some that might be and some just to make everyone else nervous. And Kevin and I will look over those who make it to us very closely, and we’ll pull out people, too. Jeff, I want you to monitor the emotions. Everyone’s going to be scared, of course.”
    Kevin looked at me closely. “You want to find, what? The ones who are relieved to make it past us?”
    Martini grinned. “No. She wants to spot the ones who feel guilty or triumphant.”
    Gorgeous and smart. And mine. Okay, Kevin could stay happily married.

CHAPTER 12
    AIRPORT SECURITY WAS THERE IN DROVES, as well as the Pueblo Caliente Bomb Squad, complete with several dogs, and a SWAT team. It was a big deal, and Kevin made sure it looked even bigger. I kept Alicia calm; Martini had already scanned her emotions, and he didn’t think she was involved at all. I found myself hoping someone was indeed trying to kill us—the explanation if we found nothing would be worse than defusing a bomb.
    We did our test-run strip searches—nothing. The few folks who hadn’t moved to baggage claim were sent there with an escort. The entire wing of the terminal was emptied.
    Maintenance crew was next. We found three illegal aliens from the exotic locales of Mexico and Guatemala. These were released into the baggage claim holding area and told to get a green card. None of us felt it was right to be too hard on them—they were here to work, not to try to kill innocent people.
    We also found a couple of younger maintenance kids who had drugs stashed, another couple having sex on company time, and one asleep. All reprimanded, all clean, so to speak, all sent to baggage claim.
    I really didn’t think the bomb was going to be in the checked bags, and if it was, we wanted the passengers off the plane anyway, so we had them file through first.
    Alicia was great. She explained we were looking for a terrorist, just as I’d told her to. She sounded frightened because she was, and we’d encouraged her not to try to remain calm and so ensured that the passengers and crew would be in a higher state of anxiety than normal.
    This was going to be hard on Martini—there were a lot of things that wore his blocks and empathic synapses down. I learned new ones it seemed like every week. Running this kind of job without his filters up was probably going to be a new example, but we couldn’t risk him