Alien vs. Alien

staffers are the culprits.”
    “How fast are the tanks being assembled?” Franklin asked. He didn’t sound like he was trying to be funny.
    “Talk has moved from nasty threats into real ones,” Henry reported. “And because this happened on U.S. soil, at the International One World Festival no less, the U.S. is also being held responsible and blamed.”
    I looked at Oliver. “MJO, what’s the likelihood this means war?”
    “High. Escalation will be easy to influence, and it will come out quickly that Oren and Jakob here are Mossad. That’s all it will take.”
    “I hate these people. Though I’m hella impressed with how damned well they know exactly what I’ll do.”
    “What you’ll all do,” Big George said. “I have all the C.I.A.’s confidential files on all of American Centaurion and Centaurion Division.” He shook his head. “The expectation is that if World War Three truly happens, Centaurion Division will be forced to take an active role.”
    “I’ll call my husband,” Mona said. “This must be stopped.”
    “Wait,” Franklin said. “If you do that, you let him know where you are.”
    “Why would that be a bad thing?” she asked. Several of us, myself included, nodded in agreement.
    “What will the immediate reaction be, if you call and say you’re at Andrews Air Force Base?” Franklin asked in return. So he had been given that sage advice and just hadn’t used it earlier. Good to know.
    Mona took a deep breath. “I’ll have to explain
why
I’m here.”
    “And?” Franklin prodded.
    “I would say I was attacked, Mossad came to help us, and they took us to Andrews for protection.”
    “Does that sound believable?” Buchanan asked. “I mean, we know it’s essentially the truth, but will your husband, or anyone else, believe it? It sounds fishy to me, and I’m intimately involved in the situation.”
    “And, attacked by whom?” Franklin asked. “If my wife disappeared, then called to tell me she’d indeed been attacked and almost kidnapped but
not
by the people I thought, I’d damn well want to know who she’d actually been attacked by and who was trying to kidnap her. So I could send my tanks and missiles toward them.”
    “I’d want to know why you were taken to the Air Force Base, not your own Embassy,” White added.
    “Oh. Well, then I would explain more fully.” She looked around. “And that would mean an explanation no one will believe.”
    “Some will believe it. Oh. Crap.”
    Franklin nodded. “Some
will
believe it. And they’ll really believe it when an alien armada arrives.”
    “But Clarence is the one who did the attacking,” Abigail said.
    “Right. And he’s an A-C. If we say Clarence is a terrorist, the instant assumption will be that you’re all terrorists. It’s not necessarily the logical view, and as individuals not everyone would believe it. But people as a whole will assume the A-Cs are here as enemies, not protectors. And all those fears will be instantly confirmed when we’re attacked from space.”
    I could see it—world war, us fighting each other instead of the space invaders. Us fighting each other
and
the space invaders. Earth being taken, easily, because we had high-level influencers along with people in strategic positions within the world governments who wanted it that way and were doing their parts to ensure this happened. And despite everything we’d tried to do to avoid it, we’d still ended up playing right into their hands.
    “Can one person really be this important?” Jeremy asked.
    “I would be a symbol,” Mona said. “It wouldn’t be about me but about what I stand for.”
    “Assassinate Archduke Ferdinand, have yourself a world war. Yeah, one person can be this important. Chuckie, for example. Without him, we apparently have no allies.”
    “Like England during World War Two, at least for a while,” Franklin agreed.
    “England had Churchill leading them, at least.” I always thought of Councilor Leonidas as Alpha Four’s version of Churchill. Chuckie had agreed with that assessment. I realized I was thinking of him in the past tense. That had to stop. If we gave up now, the bad guys won for sure. “Never give up.”
    “Some countries will surrender to the invaders instantly,” Oliver said. “There’s too much historical precedent to assume otherwise.”
    “Never give up.” That was Churchill’s famous line, after all. So, if we were England, what did that make Alpha Four and the rest of