Alien vs. Alien

Kitty’s saying is that if the senator was involved, then whoever set that android on us would have sent a hit squad capable of taking out Christopher and Jeff, too, not just Chuck.”
    “Succinctly put, Ames.” She was really coming along. I felt all proud.
    Alpha Team seemed shocked into silence. Airborne, however, were also in attendance, and my flyboys never missed a beat. “So, can we see the pictures?” Jerry asked, miraculously with a straight face. “Purely in the interests of law and science.”
    “Yeah,” Matt Hughes agreed. “We should know what the fake pictures look like, so we’re able to denounce them.”
    “And so we can be sure we’re looking for the right negatives,” Chip Walker added.
    “We’re married men,” Randy Muir said, as Joe Billings nodded his head. “So we can look at the pictures safely, since there’s no way we’d be looking for any reason other than investigative interest.”
    “How many shots were there?” Joe asked. “I mean, enough for a full calendar, or just a poster-type one with a single photo?”
    “Oh, I’ll bet there were plenty,” Jerry said. “I mean, you can’t blackmail someone with just one shot.”
    “True enough,” Hughes agreed. “There are probably extra sets hidden in various hideouts, too.”
    “I say we get right on it,” Walker said. “We don’t want dirty pictures of Kitty in anyone’s hands but ours.”
    “Awww, you guys just warm my heart. And while I think it’s great of you to offer to sacrifice yourselves for the cause, I actually had another unit in mind for this job.”
    Once again, all heads swiveled toward me. “Just who were you planning on bringing in on this?” Jeff asked. He sounded lost, frustrated, and a little freaked out. Why? He’d known about this weeks longer than I had. Surely he’d had time to adjust to the idea that this “news” was going to get out one day.
    “Really? Well, first off, the person who let Chuckie know what was going on in the first place. And, to assist him, I’m going to do what any normal person in this situation would do.”
    “Pay the blackmail?” Naomi asked.
    “Make a sex tape with Jeff to show your range?” Abigail suggested.
    “Go on Leno to confess and say you’re really, really sorry?” was Amy’s contribution.
    “Request your own reality show?” Melanie chimed in.
    “Go back to your roots to ‘find yourself’ and reconnect with the simple girl you used to be?” Emily offered as her option.
    Clearly the gals were on the same wavelength as the flyboys. The others seemed cluelessee as her s. Alone on my own wavelength. Always the way.
    “No. What normal people do when they’re being blackmailed is to go to professionals for help. We have a special K-9 unit that owes us, big time. I’m going to get Mister Joel Oliver and Senator Armstrong together, and we’re all going to go to the police.”
    “I don’t want you going to the police,” Jeff said in the growly man voice he seemed to still somehow believe I obeyed anywhere other than in bed. “We can handle this ourselves.”
    “Blackmail tends to fall to the F.B.I.,” Kevin said quickly. “Though I’m not recommending that we contact that agency for help. I’m just pointing out that the police rarely focus on those kinds of cases.”
    “The K-9 guys are a special unit. They may have been somewhat unimpressive in terms of their taxi services, but they were spot on when it came to surveillance. So we set a team of spies to catch a team of spies.”
    Chuckie sighed. “I can’t argue with the idea. In part because you haven’t actually taken or passed the HSAC test.”
    “Seriously? You’re actually going to insist we go through all that again?”
    “The instructor actually had everyone’s tests in his hands,” Gower said. “He’d clutched them in panic, and they made it out of the building with him. I asked, as Pontifex, for them to be processed immediately. So, ah, everyone other than you, Kitty, is approved.”
    I let this one sit on the air for a moment. “So, what you’re saying, Paul and Chuckie, is that everyone other than me can discuss whatever the hell is going on that Jeff, Christopher, and Chuckie spent time stressing was a bigger deal than my faked photos. But I can’t. Is that right?”
    “Right.” Gower didn’t say this with a lot of enthusiasm I was fairly sure I saw Tim and Reader wincing. Checked the expressions of the men in the room with me. Check, they all