by Gini Koch
“I have one word for you: Mephistopheles. I also point to yesterday’s odd superbeing cluster right there in the Chaco again and say trust me on this one. So, Nurse Carter, what’s your take? Is your government fully behind the idea of Aliens: The Next Generation?”
“Not everyone in the government,” she said quietly.
“Just like here. How nice, we have something in common. So, since you knew who he was, what’s the story on my ‘uncle,’ Peter the Dingo Dog?”
“Dingo Dog?” Mom stared at me, then her head snapped toward Nurse Carter. “Are you saying that the man who tried to kill Kitty was the Dingo?”
Nurse Carter nodded. “Yes.”
“Just who is the Dingo? I mean, I’ve heard some wacky names in my time, but his takes the prize.”
“He’s an assassin,” Mom said.
“Him trying to kill me all day yesterday, and telling me he was hired to do so, were sort of a tip-off for that one, Mom. I meant, why does he have that particular nickname, and why are you so much more freaked now than you were before you heard his name? Oh, and either he was faking his voice or he’s not from Australia.”
Mom heaved a sigh. “He’s not. No one is sure where he’s originally from. We have no pictures of him. Peter Kasperoff might not be his real name, but most sources say he’s from the former Eastern Bloc somewhere, most likely KGB trained. He got the nickname because he’s like a vicious wild dog.”
“A loyal dog,” Nurse Carter added.
“A loyal dog you knew, accurately, when you don’t have any of your other facts really straight. So, what’s your connection to the Dingo?”
Nurse Carter shook her head. “There is a dossier on him. I was able to read it before—” She stopped herself and slammed her mouth shut.
“Look, either we’re all friends here or we’re going to have to lock you away. Right now, whoever you want avenged or whatever wrongs you want to right, we’re probably your best hope for achieving that. So spill it.”
Chuckie cleared his throat. “Right now, you’re in deep trouble. Prove yourself helpful, and I can make all those troubles disappear. Refuse to cooperate, and I’ll have to show you that the C.I.A. really is staffed with the nastiest people on the planet.”
I didn’t actually think Chuckie was going to take Nurse Carter away to torture her in unspeakable ways, but from the way she blanched, it was clear she did. She nodded slowly. “He killed the doctor at my hospital who asked too many questions.”
“You witnessed this?” Chuckie asked.
“Yes.”
“Then how is it you’re alive? I mean, he told me he didn’t like to kill pretty girls or babies, and you’re not barking, but if you could identify him, why let you live?”
Nurse Carter swallowed and looked down. “When the first gunshots came, I and two other nurses, we hid with the dead bodies in our morgue. He and his partner killed everyone. They didn’t find us. The authorities said it was terrorists. But we heard them, before we hid ourselves, when they were talking to Doctor Rijos. They wanted information he had on the…project. He refused to tell them where it was. So they…they killed everyone.”
“So no one could pass the information along,” Chuckie said. “Thorough and effective, albeit overkill. And sloppy.”
“Sloppy?” Christopher asked.
“Three women escaped,” Chuckie said calmly. “If you’re supposed to kill everyone, not checking the morgue is sloppy work.”
“You do that kind of work?” Nurse Carter asked, sounding suspicious and afraid.
“No,” Mom answered. “Our jobs are to stop people from doing that kind of work.”
“And,” I reminded everyone, “we now have less than a day to do it.”
CHAPTER 42
CHUCKIE SMILED AT ME. “Oh, I’d like Nurse Carter here to explain how she survived, however.”
“I just did,” she said.
Chuckie shook his head. “I’ve read the file on the Dingo. He isn’t sloppy. Leaving not one, not two, but three nurses alive by not checking the morgue is sloppy. I guarantee he checked. So either you’re lying, or you’re his accomplice and you’re here to infiltrate us.”
She looked like she was going to argue. Chuckie shook his head again. “I’m a very patient man. You’ve used up all the patience I’m willing to spare. Tell us the truth, the whole truth, or so help me God, I’ll make you wish the Dingo had killed you.”
His expression was calm, but his eyes were icy. She took the hint. “His partner was injured, badly, by some local police who were there when they started killing everyone. When they found us hiding, I offered to help him. We patched him up, and they let us go.”
“Why?” Mom asked. “That seems kind, but stupid.”
“I don’t know. He…he said it cleared his debt.”
“That makes sense.” Everyone looked at me. “Oh, come on! This is why he passed information to me and made me his next of kin. We’d saved his life, and his partner’s life, after they’d tried to kill us. He couldn’t let me live, right, because we had the upper hand. But he could give me what he knew I wanted, which was who hired them and who they were going after. Speaking of which, any progress?”
“It was heavily encrypted,” Serene said. “But we broke it and completed the decipher just before I needed to come over here.” She didn’t look happy. She did, however, look a lot less like, as Reader put it, our Ditz in Residence and a lot more like one of Centaurion Division’s key personnel. It was nice to see that the promotion had been good for her. So another one of us was blossoming in their new role, even under pressure; it was a small victory, but I was willing to take it.
“And?”
Serene shook her head. “One sentence: The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.”
There was dead silence. “That was it?” Chuckie asked finally, clearly voicing everyone else’s thoughts.
“The disk was corrupted, most likely from the water, but so far as we can determine, there was only that one sentence on it.” Serene clearly felt she was failing at her job. There was far too much of that going around right now.
“What the hell does that mean?” Jeff asked.
Mom’s brow was furrowed. “It’s the first line they teach you when you’re learning to type. At least, it was. Who knows how you learn these days.”
“It’s still used, Mom. I learned it.” The A-Cs and half of the humans looked really confused. It was easy to tell who was a self-taught typist in the room and who wasn’t, not that I thought this was going to help us in even the smallest way. “It’s a pangram—it uses every letter of the alphabet. You type it so you learn where every letter is on the keyboard.”
“We intercepted a typing tutorial?” Reader sounded less than thrilled.
“It was handed to me, and the Dingo Dog didn’t want anyone else to know I had it.”
“Maybe he gave it to you to confuse you,” Kevin suggested.
“No,” Tim said. “If that were his goal, he could have just told Kitty whatever he wanted. I was in the helicopter, and we were watching. I never saw him pass that to her, so he did it so no one else would know.” Hughes, Walker, and Jerry all nodded their agreement.
“So that means it’s a message.” Chuckie sounded as though he was heading for a migraine. I hated that, because it always indicated we were clueless, and I really hated that.
Something else was bugging me. “Serene, you said this line was encrypted?”
“Yes. A very complex encryption. It also had to be translated.”
“Excuse me?”
She shrugged. “The original sentence was in Russian, written in Cyrillic. We had to have Moscow Base do translations.”
“And you’re sure those were a hundred percent correct?” Christopher asked.
Serene nodded. “Yes, it was checked and verified at least ten times. Mostly because no one at Moscow Base could believe this was the entire message.”
“It means something to someone. And it was important
enough to encrypt. Or else the Dingo Dog really feels learning to type is a high-priority assignment.” I sighed. “Well, at least we know something. And that he’s loyal. Or weird. Or both.” Probably both. “He also said that he wasn’t one of the guys in the taxis, and since he was already ‘dead’ when I saw them last, he was likely telling the truth.”
“Did he give you anything on them?” Chuckie asked.
“He said they were amateurs and didn’t want to harm the merchandise.” I saw a lot of stressed out expressions. “I know. That doesn’t really give us much help at all.”
“This is the most information we’ve had, girlfriend,” Reader reminded me. “But we’re no closer.”
“Maybe we are. I heard Peter and his partner talking—well, shouting—in a foreign tongue right before we went into the Potomac. I guarantee that wherever Peter’s from, his partner is from there, too. Considering Serene just said this fab message came out in Russian, let’s figure this confirms Mom’s intel that they’re from somewhere in the former Soviet Bloc.”
“We couldn’t determine country of origin,” Serene said. “We tried, in case we were translating incorrectly. But the sentence is too short to show any kind of regional inflection.”
“And it’s an American sentence, which would mask it even more.”
Serene looked down. “I’m sorry. I’m better with explosives. Maybe…maybe Christopher should take a look. In case I’ve…missed something.” I saw the confidence she’d been showing only minutes earlier start to fade away. I didn’t want that to happen, but I had no idea what to do or say, especially if Christopher agreed with her.
I looked over just in time to see Jeff shake his head almost imperceptibly at Christopher. “No,” Christopher said quickly. “You’re doing a great job, Serene. This transition’s been hard on everyone. But I don’t think I’d get more out of this than you and the entire Imageering team have.”
Serene looked up and gave him a brave little smile, but she did look a bit more like she had earlier. I decided giving Serene a Girl Power lecture, suggesting we just call it a day and deal with whatever tomorrow night, or asking that we all get our old jobs back would probably be tactless, stupid, and useless, respectively. We needed to think, ergo, I needed to talk.
I forged on. “Based on everything we know, Peter and his partner are either related or bestest buds, or maybe the only two survivors from their village. But Peter cares enough about his partner to have let Nurse Carter live. We saved both of them, remember.” Which reminded me. “Jeff, what’s the story on Peter’s body?”
“It was gone when we got there.” Jeff sounded angry and worried. “Nurse Carter opened every freezer, no Dingo. Or his partner, but we knew that already, since he never made it inside.”
“No.” Tim shook his head. “He made it inside. All of Airborne was there, we watched. The agent teams assigned might have been turned away by what they thought were D.C. cops, but I guarantee both prisoners were checked into the hospital.” The three flyboys nodded their agreement again.
“Only one prisoner came in,” Nurse Carter stated for the official record. “Believe me, I looked for the Dingo’s partner. I never found him, and I would recognize him. All the records I saw indicated one prisoner, only, as well.”
I looked at Chuckie. “So we can be absolutely positive the C.I.A. is involved.”
CHAPTER 43
CHUCKIE GAVE ME A LONG LOOK. “Not that I’m arguing, but how do you figure? Right now, it could be any of the Alphabet Agencies.”
“True, but we both know this sounds more like the C.I.A.’s style. Don’t they have that death drug?”
“That’s the movies.”
“You were the one who told me about the death drug, when we were in high school, and you said it was real.”
“Maybe I was misinformed.”
“Right.” I stared him down. He stared back. I narrowed my eyes. He tried not to laugh. This earned a quiet growl from Jeff. “Time’s wasting,” I said finally.
Chuckie sighed. “True enough. Yes, we have such a drug, and yes, field agents use it on a somewhat frequent basis, and yes, I’m not supposed to acknowledge that we have it, let alone to a room full of people. Happy?”
“Relieved. Would have hated to have your perfect conspiracy record blemished.”
“Near perfect,” he correct.
“Right, you were wrong about where Hoffa was buried. Where is—”
“If you could go on with the situation at hand,” Mom snapped.
“Fine, fine. So, the C.I.A. took the Dingo Dog’s partner and altered the records so it appears that he was never there. He was hurt but not that badly, so I think we can safely assume he’s alive. The question is, did they use the death drug on the Dingo, or did they kill him for real and just remove his body to tidy up?”
“No idea,” Jeff said.
“I did check him, and he seemed legitimately dead,” Nurse Carter said.
Chuckie shook his head. “If they did use the drug, it’s incredibly effective. No insult to your skills as a nurse intended, but it’s unlikely you’d have realized it was a fake unless you knew the exact signs to look for.”
“And I don’t,” Nurse Carter admitted. “So we don’t know if he was really dead or not.”
Len nodded. “We all searched, and Mister Joel Oliver took a lot of pictures, but there was no way to verify if they took a real dead body or a live one.”
“All the other bodies were there,” Kyle added. “Only his was missing.”
“Okay, so we’re at a semi-dead end until we go through what he left for me as next of kin and figure out what the message means. So, time to get some other information. Mom, Chuckie, the supersoldier project—it’s clearly being run out of Paraguay. I know what happened yesterday is a part of it. But is the superbeing formation we had in Paris a scant three months ago part of it, or is it a different set of lunatics trying to create the ultimate killing machines?”
Chuckie looked at Mom. Mom gave him the “oh what the hell” sign. He looked back to me. “Based on information we gained during the infiltration—”
“You mean Operation Confusion, right?”
Everyone I could see other than Chuckie winced. He just laughed. “Yes, that one. Anyway, based on what we were able to ferret out, there is a program, but whether or not Paris was merely part of it or is another initiative, we don’t know yet. Someone very high up in the government is in charge.”
“How high?”
“So high we can’t actually get many details. Any time any team goes to Paraguay to investigate, the locations we’ve identified as having the project are wiped clean.”
I looked at Caroline. “That’s what your senator’s doing down there all the time, isn’t it? His committees are trying to catch these people, or at least a trace of them.”
She nodded. “So far, just as Chuck said, nothing.”
I remembered something. “Chuckie, what happened to the picture we took from Nurse Carter?”
“I have it here.” He pulled it out of his inner suit pocket. “Is now the time?”
“Yes, it is.”
Chuckie nodded, turned in his chair so he was looking directly at Caroline, shot Jeff a look that, to me, clearly said “monitor emotions” and put the picture down in front of her. “Who are the people in this photo?” His tone was very friendly.
Caroline looked at it. “Well, that’s most, though not all, of the team on the last few missions to Paraguay.”
“Who are the men behind you?” Chuckie kept his tone friendly. “I recognize most of the others, but we need to identify anyone who might be in danger.”
“The one nearest to me is my friend Pete.” She looked up at me. “He was the one who was supposed to pick me up from the airport. I still don’t know why he hasn’t answered his phone.”
I managed not to say anything I knew Chuckie didn’t want me to. “Who’s the dude next to Pete?”
“His cousin, Vic.”
; “As in Victor?” Chuckie asked. She nodded. “What are their last names?”
“Keller.”
“How long have you and Pete been dating?” Chuckie asked.
“Oh, we’re not. Not really.” Caroline sighed. “He’s older than me, by a lot. I know he likes me, but I’m not sure that I want to date someone in his line of work.”
“What is his line of work?” Chuckie asked. I was amazed at how calm and conversational he sounded.
“He and Vic work for Titan.”
“That’s the large security firm that contracts with the government, right, Titan Security?” Chuckie asked, still sounding as though they were catching up on friends from college.
“Yeah. I know it’s supposed to make you feel more secure if your guy’s always packing heat, but it sort of freaks me out. I mean, we need it when we’re down in Paraguay. There’s lots going on, and having Pete and Vic with us keeps everyone safe.”
“Is that how you met him?” I asked. “Because he was assigned to your protection detail?”
“Yeah. Titan has the contract to cover us when we’re in South America. The senator and I have gone down so often that Titan assigned a permanent team to us.”
“Has he been to your apartment?”
Caroline blushed. “Yes, but not for anything illicit. He’s taken me out several times, and he always picks me up at home.”
My memory nudged. “You said he was with an Embassy. How can he be working for Titan and be attached to an Embassy at the same time?”
“Vic’s wife is part of the diplomatic mission from Paraguay. Pete and Vic are really close, so they both house with the Embassy. They got some special approval to do that, I don’t know from where. But Senator McMillan said it looked legit.”
“So he checked their credentials?” Chuckie asked.
Caroline nodded. “He doesn’t like them, I don’t think. I know he doesn’t like that Pete’s taken me out. Though he does his best to hide it.” She sighed. “Pete’s supposedly my date for the President’s Ball tomorrow. Not that I have any idea if that’s still on, either the date or the Ball.” She laughed half-heartedly. “Or if you’re even going to let me leave your Embassy.”