Alien Diplomacy (48 page)

W
E PULLED INTO THE SAME PARKING GARAGE
Jeff had had us head into only yesterday. “What is this, Secret Meeting Central? Where’s the employees’ lounge and the conference room?”

Ishmael parked on the same level I’d been on with the Dingo and all his cronies the day before. I spotted a few bullet casings that had been missed by the cleanup team and sent Reader a text about it. No one was going to accuse me of not paying attention this time.

Ishmael sighed. “It’s under construction, only the construction’s on hold because of budget cuts. The foundation’s considered somewhat unstable, though it’s safe enough as long as there aren’t hundreds of cars parked here. So no one comes around.”

“I’ll bet. So, is there a posted schedule? And, if so, whose supposedly clandestine meeting are we interrupting? Homeland Security? C.I.A.? Keystone Kops?” Reader’s text reply was, charitably, snippy. I snipped back. “Huh?” I realized Ishmael had said something I’d missed.

“I
said
that this is a safe location. We meet here all the time.”

“Huh. I wonder who else does. And who else knows you do.”

“We’re secure,” he snapped as two limos, followed by five taxis, arrived and parked. We all got out. I desperately wanted to make a Spy vs. Spy joke, but even in this company, perhaps especially in this company, I figured it would go over badly.

Jeff pointedly walked over and moved me and White away from Ishmael. “We’re fine,” I said quietly.

“I prefer you closer to me, for a variety of reasons.”

“No complaints from me. Where’s Jamie?”

“With Denise, at our new day care center.” He sounded resigned. “I can’t argue with the need, and Jamie adores her, so I think it’ll be fine. Your parents are at the Embassy in case of problems. Christopher’s there, too…just in case.” He didn’t have to say just in case for what—at the rate we were going, the likelihood that someone would try to take over the Embassy this afternoon seemed at least probable.

“Good, though I think the people responsible for all the crap with the Embassy are here in the parking garage with us. Why did you choose this location yesterday?”

“It’s big, empty, and no one comes in this area. Isn’t that why you had the taxi guy come here?”

“No, I didn’t direct him. He came here on his own. He says they come here all the time.”

“Huh.” Jeff didn’t seem to think this was too big a deal. “I wasn’t trying to be exclusive with the location, baby. It was just close and convenient.”

Kevin was along for this ride, and he flashed the P.T.C.U. badge. “Let’s remember, gentlemen, that you’re meeting with a Federal agent and act accordingly.” Ishmael and his gang all nodded.

“Richard,” Reader said, “I’d like you in the limo with Paul.” He didn’t make it sound like a request.

White sighed. “Fun while it lasted, Missus Martini. I’m complying, James, no need to look so distressed.” White got into the limo with Gower, though he left the door open so they could both see and hear what was going on.

Chuckie took a long look at Ishmael. “I want all the disguises off, and I want them off now.” His tone clearly indicated arguing would be a bad idea. Reader and Tim were flanking him, and the looks on their faces shared that they agreed with Chuckie and would be happy to help him kick some serious K-9 butt if said order was ignored.

Ishmael nodded, and he and the others removed their rather lame disguises. Once off, they all looked like regular guys in their twenties and thirties. I could see the cop in all of them, though. There was something about the way they stood, the aura of authority they radiated, not to mention the cop haircuts.

I noted all the dogs were sniffing intently. I looked where they were focused—it was the area where I’d spotted the bullet casings.

Chuckie looked long and hard at Ishmael and a few of the others. “Do you know why they were avoiding you?” I asked.

He nodded, as he pointed to Ishmael and the ones I identified as
Curly and Larry. “They were part of the police team that came to my apartment a few months ago when it was…ransacked.” I presumed he meant when it was trashed during Operation Confusion, but I kept that to myself.

“We were sent there,” Ishmael said.

“Why were K-9 units at an attempted robbery?” Jeff asked quickly, presumably because he didn’t think I was smart enough to not give things away.

Ishmael shrugged. “We’d gotten a tip that it was a drug deal gone bad.”

Chuckie nodded. “Typical frame setup.” He gave me a pointed look. “It didn’t work.” I got the hint. I was to shut up and not share why I thought it hadn’t worked. It was an easy guess—Chuckie, likely with assistance from the Gower girls, had found and removed anything planted before any local law enforcement had shown up.

“Yeah, well, the hell you caused us for that made it pretty clear we were close to blowing your cover.” Ishmael didn’t sound too sorry about that. Prince was straining at his lead, but Ishmael held him pretty firmly.

“Illegal search and seizure isn’t good for anyone’s record,” Chuckie replied. “You might want to remember that.”

“We’ll take a memo,” Ishmael said in a bored tone of voice.

“Do that,” Kevin said pleasantly. “Kidnapping’s not on the list of things good little boys do, either.”

While they were doing the typical male posturing that seemed to activate whenever one alpha male was in proximity to another, I counted heads. Len and Kyle were leaning against the limo with the current and former Pontifexes in it, and Jerry, Hughes, and Walker were leaning against the second limo. Each limo had its doors open on the sides facing us. All of the men looked very ready to rumble. Counting me, that meant we had nine on our side, eleven if White and Gower got into any fight we might have, which I knew both of them would.

There had been two men and two dogs per taxi. It wasn’t complicated math. So we were evenly matched, if I didn’t count Prince and the rest of his pack. Only, that was wrong. “Officer Moe, where’s your twelfth man and beast?” I asked as Prince yanked hard and pulled out of Ishmael’s grasp. He made a beeline for where I’d spotted the casings and started sniffing around.

Prince started barking his head off. Ishmael ran to his dog, and I followed. I spotted something other than bullet casings. Blood. And lots of it.

T
HE OTHER DOGS JOINED PRINCE,
and everyone crowded around us. “Stop shoving, you’re going to ruin evidence,” Ishmael shouted.

Everyone backed off, the K-9 cops dragging their dogs away. Prince whined, loudly, then threw back his head and howled. The other dogs joined in.

“We have two officers down,” I told Kevin and Chuckie once the men had quieted their dogs. “One human, one canine.”

“We’ll need to run tests to see whose blood this is, Kitty,” Kevin said.

I shook my head and pointed to the dogs. “They already know. You think they were just doing the dog version of a twenty-one gun salute for a stranger?” I looked at Ishmael. “You’ve been too obvious. Someone spotted you following me and Mister Joel Oliver and decided to thin your herd.”

Ishmael and the rest of his guys looked ill. “He wanted to look for clues to what you were doing here yesterday,” the one I thought of as Larry said.

The rest of them started talking, and it was clear they were all freaked, upset, and ready to hit something. Ishmael tried to get them under control, but the dogs weren’t the only ones not listening to commands.

“Shut UP!” Jeff bellowed. Everyone, man and beast, got very silent very quickly. No one bellowed like my husband. Once his voice had stopped echoing, Jeff looked around, eyes narrowed. “I feel for your loss. But right now, there’s a number of bad things going on, and if you’re not going to become part of the solution,
then we’re going to arrest you all and let the guys in charge of taking people to Guantanamo sort you out.”

Ishmael’s squad nodded and pulled themselves together. I wasn’t sure how much human speak the dogs understood, but they were all clear that the Leader of the Pack had just laid down the law, and none of them wanted to challenge for dominance. Eleven dogs were sitting at attention, ears alert, ready for action or for doggie treats, depending.

Kevin and Chuckie took down the pertinent information while Reader and Tim called for some agent teams. No reason to involve the D.C. police—apparently the only ones who could make it on time to a crime scene had been laid off and were here with us.

I spent the time handing out teething biscuit doggie treats and pets, which earned me a lot of dog kisses. Ensure the big dogs love you, that was my motto. I discreetly used a baby wipe to clean off the dog slobber.

“So, you want to tell us what’s going on now?” Jeff asked once our teams showed up, all in limos. The A-Cs got out and started doing their thing. The human drivers stayed in the cars. I resisted the impulse to have Jeff and Chuckie do some sort of lie detector test on them—if we couldn’t trust the majority of our human agents, we were screwed anyway. However, I found myself hoping Ishmael was right and that the garage wasn’t going to find a dozen vehicles to be too much for it.

Ishmael and I brought everyone up to speed. “So, you’re all no longer law enforcement,” Kevin said when we were done. “You’re just vigilantes.”

Ishmael shot him a dirty look. “Not my fault we got cut.” He glared at Chuckie. “One too many complaints will do that for you.”

Chuckie shook his head. “Neither I nor anyone in my agency caused your team to be cut.” He had his Conspiracy Hat on, I could tell. “When cutting units, I’d think one of the last any force would cut would be K-9, if only for the dogs’ drug-sniffing ability.”

“Yeah, well, that wasn’t the opinion of the higher-ups,” Ishmael said angrily.

“What were you working on around the time you all got the pink slips?” I asked.

“The usual stuff, running down drug tips, handling some aspects of search and seizure. Nothing extraordinary. His case was the oddest,” Ishmael jerked his head at Chuckie.

“Did you take anything from Chuckie’s place and enter it into evidence?”

The entire squad shook their heads. The one I was thinking of as Curly cocked his head at me. “You think we found something somewhere that made us targets?”

“Yeah, I really do.” I pondered some more. “Were you sent to any high-profile places? Like the White House?”

“I know where you’re going with this,” Larry said. “We’d have to go through case files to determine if we stepped on toes we shouldn’t have, and we don’t have access to those anymore. But, just so you know, regular cops don’t go to the White House.”

“You resisted the desire to break in and plant bugs to track the President? I’m impressed. You just limited yourselves to Embassy Row, so you violated the rights of, what, ten or twenty countries?” The words left my mouth, and Jeff and Chuckie both stared at me. I stared back. “Oh.
Snap
.”

“What?” Ishmael asked.

“You put surveillance into every Embassy around ours, right?”

He sighed. “Yes. We wanted to know what you were up to.”

“You mean you wanted to know if Mister Joel Oliver was under our protection or in our custody.”

“Yeah, that was part of it.”

“He’ll be gratified to discover that he has a fan club. And then you picked up that we had information on a notorious assassin, and what better way to prove your squad’s worth than to bring down the Dingo, right?”

He grimaced. “Right. You’d have done the same in my place.”

“Possibly. We can debate that at another time. But let me ask the big question. Did you happen to put illegal surveillance into the Paraguayan Embassy?”

“It’s not illegal—” Ishmael started.

“Can it,” Kevin snapped. “I could arrest you on a laundry list of violations, every one of which would hold up in a court of law. You’ve kidnapped an ambassador. The only reason we don’t have all of you in handcuffs is because you did help save said ambassador’s life. Keep on playing coy, and we’ll show you how we do things at the P.T.C.U. Trust me when I say you don’t want to know.”

“Fine,” Ishmael said. “Yes, we went there. We hit every Embassy within a mile radius of yours.”

“And I’ll wager you’ve also been investigating Titan Security, especially their head man, Antony Marling, right?”

Ishmael grimaced. “Yes. There’s not too much to find. Titan’s really good about hiding histories on anyone who matters in the company, Marling especially.”

“Were you working on that before you were cut?” Chuckie asked.

Ishmael sighed. “Not officially.”

“But you were unofficially, in your off hours?” I asked. They all nodded. I looked at Jeff. “We have room.”

He sighed. “I’m getting officially tired of adopting strays.”

“What are you talking about?” Larry asked indignantly. “Our dogs belong to us. Each one’s registered and probably has a bloodline better than any of yours.”

“I’d take that bet, especially in regard to my husband, but I’m in a charitable mood, so I’ll just explain things clearly for all of you. We’re tabling determining why your squad got the ax, for now.”

“Why?” Ishmael asked, eyes narrowed.