by Gini Koch
Two of the remaining prisoners looked fine to stand, but the two ragged-looking ones clearly needed a seat. “Carmine, can we get four more chairs in here?”
Everyone looked at me in surprise. “There’s not really room,” he said. Correctly.
Len and Kyle stood up. “They can have our chairs,” Len said, indicating that the two ragged men should sit. Both of those looked shocked, but they took the chairs as offered. Len and Kyle went over and stood near the two remaining guys.
“Thank you,” one of the ragged men said. He looked around. “Are we part of your meeting?”
“Were you down in the cells with the woman who exploded?” Waited until all nine of them met my eyes and nodded. “Then, yes, you’re part of this meeting. I have no idea why you were down in the holding cells, but you may have seen or heard something that can help us, so, right now, you’re all part of the team.”
“Don’t expect it to last,” Melville said. He pointed to the girls. “Soliciting.”
“I guessed.” Looked at the two ragged men. “Vagrancy?” They both nodded. Took a look at the men in suits. “DUIs.” They looked surprised but nodded as well. “And our two younger dudes?”
“Disturbing the peace,” Melville replied. “Drunk and disorderly. The usual. They’re frat boys on vacation.”
“Awesome. So we have nine people with different viewpoints and different ways of looking at the world. Excellent. We’re just going to confirm our living status with the President and then we’re going to discuss what went on in minute detail.”
“Told you that was Code Name: First Lady,” one of the working girls said smugly to the other two. The other girls looked impressed. So did the rest of the prisoners. Figured the awe was going to be short-lived and didn’t get cocky.
“That movie is not really happening,” I said to the room at large. No one looked convinced. “Is it?” I asked Kevin.
Who grinned. “We can’t really stop Hollywood, Kitty.”
“Ugh. Moving on, let’s call Jeff before he loses it. I’m sure they’ve heard about the explosion by now.”
“They have,” Kyle said. “But I sent Mister Reynolds and Mister Buchanan a text already, letting them know we’re all alive and unharmed and that we’d be calling shortly.”
“Great. Then let’s make the call.”
“Do we want to video conference?” Romeo asked.
It was a good question, which I pondered. “Probably?” Wasn’t sure what the fallout would be with the nine prisoners joining in.
Kevin leaned next to me and I leaned over as well. “The A-Cs can give them a different memory, remember?” he said softly.
“Not if they’re intricately involved,” I whispered back.
“The CIA’s helped make some advancements with that. Trust me, if we need to erase this memory, we can.”
“How Men in Black of us. Again. But fine.” Straightened up and looked at Romeo. “Good call. Video conferencing it is.” While Viola and Carmine were getting that set up, my phone rang. Happily, it was my Carly Rae Jepsen “Call Me Maybe” ringtone. Dug the phone out of my purse. “Jeff, why are you calling me directly? We’re about to be calling through on the hotline or Bat Phone or whatever.”
“Baby, are you alright?” He didn’t sound freaked out, which was good, presumably because he’d been able to emotionally read me and the others and none of us were panicked anymore.
“Yes, I’m fine. And it wasn’t my fault.”
“It’s never your fault. What happened?”
“I’m planning to tell you all about it on the about-to-happen joint video conference call.”
“That’s fine, but I wanted to talk to my wife, one on one, to verify her well-being privately first. Call me a caveman.”
“Happily, every night in bed. Touched and all that. But the game’s afoot and I’m fine. We’re all fine. No one’s hurt and, despite our worries, per Tito it appears that we don’t have Death Virus Two launching.”
“Good.” He didn’t sound like he felt all was good.
Contemplated what to say. “Miss you.”
“Miss you, too. And you’ve only been gone less than an hour.”
That was it. He was already stressing about me and the kids heading off without him. “It won’t be all action while I’m gone.”
“Any action when I’m not there to help you and protect you, baby, is too much.”
“Right back atcha. You’ll have your own crap to deal with, too. And I’m not leaving yet.”
“Feels like you’ve already left.”
Heaved a sigh. “Look at it this way—Charlie’s going to be teething soon. If it all works out, we’ll be far enough away from you that you won’t be in agony from his pain.”
Jeff chuckled. “Love the spin. Okay, I’m getting glared at by pretty much everyone. I think we have to get off and be official.”
“Yeah. Oh, be aware that we have nine people who were in the holding cells with us, so be sure no one over there spills any beans we don’t want shared.”
“Why do you have criminals with you?”
“We had to rescue them so they weren’t killed, and we didn’t have time to take them anywhere else. Besides, they may have seen something.”
“Only my girl. Fine, but I want to be on record that I’m not giving any of them jobs and you’re not bringing them onto the team.”
“I’m not planning to do so, Jeff.”
“You never plan it, baby. It just happens.”
“Blah, blah, blah. Love you.”
“Love you, too.” He sighed. “This is a terrible time for this kind of action against us.”
“Is there ever a good time?”
Jeff laughed. “Good point. Just be careful, baby. Something’s really off about all of this, and you’re the focus of whatever’s coming.”
CHAPTER 19
WE HUNG UP and I turned back to the center. The table was now one big screen showing us the other room and, presumably, they were seeing us on the many video screens over there. Didn’t ask how the A-Cs did it, because I only cared that they could.
Did the usual pleasantries, then brought the folks in the very crowded Large Situation Room up to speed on what had gone down. When we were finished there was silence.
Chuckie broke it. “Why?”
“Why what?” Melville asked.
“We told you,” Manfred said. “The gate was calibrated for Caliente Base. We didn’t come here intentionally.”
“Why the elaborate ruse is, I think, what Chuckie’s asking about.” He nodded. “And I agree.” I’d had some time to calm down and think. Not a lot of time, to be sure, but some, and things didn’t add up, regardless of who’d sent the Exploding Casey-Bot to us. “Though us being here is another part of the confusion.”
Jeff nodded. “Let’s deal with the bomb first. There was absolutely no guarantee that anyone would actually bring Kitty to the station.”
“No,” Siler said. “There’s precedent for it. They know that she’ll run right to our K-Nine friends and vice versa. That relationship is as old as your time in D.C.”
“So we were patsies?” Melville asked, sounding pissed. Not that I could blame him.
“So was the Casey-Bot. In that sense.”
“She was confused.” This came from one of the working girls, the one who’d marked me as the real FLOTUS. Couldn’t guess her age—could have been eighteen, could have been thirty. Makeup and the hard living of being a streetwalker had aged her for sure. She had frizzy blonde hair and looked like she weighed about eighty pounds. Didn’t see any track marks, though, so I had a little hope that she wasn’t a junkie.
“What’s your name?” I asked her.
“Star.”
“Right. What’s your real name, babe? No one here is going to be one of your johns, so let’s be who
we really are, okay?”
She looked embarrassed. One of the other girls, this one a black girl who looked a hell of a lot less downtrodden and who I thought was probably around twenty, rolled her eyes. She had tight curls, a short ’do, and a voluptuous figure. Same amount of makeup as the others, but it looked better on her. “Her name is Jane. I’m Rhonda, and this is Meriel. She’s from the Czech Republic.”
The girl indicated as Meriel had long, curly black hair, big eyes, and was tiny but top-heavy. Unlike Jane, who looked like she’d been on the streets for a while, or Rhonda, who looked completely confident, Meriel didn’t look experienced or confident.
“How long has Meriel been in the country?” I asked Rhonda.
“Not too long. Came with a boyfriend who dumped her on the street with nothing. Our pimp took her in.” Rhonda looked at Jane. “I don’t think that thing was confused, though. I think she was scared. At least until she,” she nodded toward me, “showed up.”
“Explain what you both mean, please,” Chuckie said. “Jane, you go first.”
“Okay. Well, she just didn’t seem like she knew what was going on. She was in the middle cell, which was odd, because she should have been in with us, don’t you think?” she asked Rhonda.
But it was Officer Larry who answered. “She would have been, however based on who’d called to have her arrested, and who she was then asking for, the Chief wanted her alone. We have enough holding cells that we could do it.”
“She didn’t seem right,” Meriel said quietly.
“Accurate,” I said. “But how do you mean?”
“Her reactions . . . I am new here but I know English, it’s why we came. She seemed more lost than I was when Sergei left me. She seemed normal when the police were with her, though.”
“Yeah,” Rhonda said. “She was all up in their faces about how she needed to speak to the First Lady and it was life or death. The moment they left, though, she sort of turned off.”
“Android, do you think?” Chuckie asked. Others in the room started talking and he shook his head. They stopped. “I’m asking Kitty. She’s had by far the most experience with them.”
“Yeah and it does sort of say android or Fem-Bot. I think we can rule Fem-Bots out, though, because as far as we know, there aren’t that many models.”
“Was she an android like . . . Joe and Randy?” Lorraine asked slowly.
“Or more like the first ones you dealt with?” Claudia added.
Lorraine and Claudia were my two best A-C girlfriends, Captains on Alpha Team, typically Dazzler brilliant and beautiful, and they were married to Joe Billings and Randy Muir, respectively, who were two of my five flyboys. During Operation Epidemic the flyboys, along with many others, had been captured—first by Gustav Drax, before he’d become our Royal Vatusan Ally, and the second time by Stephanie and her Android Army. They’d definitely preferred Drax.
Stephanie had been turning Joe and Randy into very unwilling androids in a method that seemed to have worked in some ways. The guys were now more like the Six Million Dollar Man than a regular human. However, they were still them, and still, per Tito, more organic than not. However, they were a lot less organic than they had been, and my team and I had basically found them just in time.
“No idea,” I admitted. “She blew up too fast. But I can say that if she was turned into an android by the same method, then either it didn’t agree with her or she was really at death’s door anyway.”
“She didn’t register as non-human, so I can’t tell you if she was actually sick or not,” Tito said. “I didn’t use the OVS because I was expecting an epidemic situation, and by the time we realized that there was something wrong all hell was breaking loose. However, I want to stress that there’s something distinctly different about whatever we want to call that thing that exploded than from what we’ve seen from androids or Fem-Bots.”
“She looked and sounded like she was dying,” Evalyne said.
Phoebe nodded. “And she did say that it was because of Cliff.”
“That could easily have been programming,” Kevin pointed out.
“Programming or not, I think someone tossing out our known boogeyman is not to be trusted. Frankly, I think we have three main suspects—Cliff and his Crazy Eights or however many are left, Stephanie and the Tinkerer, or Harvey Gutermuth.”
“Why would you think Gutermuth is a suspect for this?” Jeff asked. “He refused to help her, didn’t he?”
“That’s what he told the police. But if the plan was to get me into a small area where the Casey-Bot blowing up would have the best chance of killing me, I can’t think of a better way to get the cops to do what you want than to pretend that your assassination tool is stalking you and has to be arrested.”
“That she’d be put down in holding would be a given,” Melville said. “But you actually showing up wasn’t a sure thing.”
“Yes, it was,” Chuckie said. “As Benjamin said earlier, the K-Nine unit requested it, and Kitty went.”
“But there wasn’t a guarantee that any of us would go to her,” Melville argued.
“Dude, come on. You guys focus on the weird. Our enemies know that. I’m on the side of thinking it was a pretty sure thing that this would catch your attention.”
Chuckie nodded. “I think the question is how they expected it to work.”
“Well, everything our enemies toss at us tends to be doing double duty. So, could it all have been an elaborate ruse just to get us to go through the gate and end up at Caliente Base? And if so, why?”
“I find it hard-to-impossible to believe that our enemies would have tried to blow you up but have ensured that, should you manage to escape, you’d end up in one of our Bases.” Jeff’s sarcasm knob was heading for eleven. “Unless everyone over there has been turned or mind-controlled, it makes no sense.”
“I was the first one through the gate,” Colette said. “I didn’t stop to calibrate it, because calibration for the Dome means we can send as many through as fast as we need. But that’s not true of going elsewhere. We should have had difficulties coming here. But we didn’t.”
“So it’s safe to assume that whoever changed the gate calibration wasn’t the same as whoever put Casey into action,” Chuckie said. Might not have been in the room with him, but I could still see the wheels turning. Just didn’t think he was getting anything, based on how it looked like a migraine might be on his near horizon.
“Why make Casey or whatever it was look so bad that I was called in?” Tito asked. “An epidemic scare would have resulted in a lockdown—is that the only reason? Because if it is, why did she explode?”
“Because,” one of the frat boys said, “you didn’t fall for it.”
CHAPTER 20
THE GUY WHO’D SPOKEN reminded me a little bit of Len and his pal reminded me a tad of Kyle, at least as they’d been when I’d first met them. These two were in a frat, meaning they were in college, and they were likely jocks. Whether they were like Len and Kyle and therefore smart jocks was the question of the moment.
“Name, rank, serial number,” I said to him. “As in, where are you from, where do you go to school, and which frat are you two in?”
“I’m Bud, this is Cujo,” he indicated the bigger guy. “We’re from Chicago but we live in Tallahassee now. Alpha Tau Omega fraternity at Florida State.”
“Not PIKEs?” Kyle asked suspiciously. Knew why. Kyle ran my Cause which, when I was the wife of the Vice President, had been getting antirape programs into colleges across the country, modeling the program on what Kyle had created at USC after he and Len had run into me in Vegas. Kyle, therefore, knew every problem frat on every campus. He’d recently mentioned that the Pi Kappa Alpha chapter in Florida had been getting in trouble a lot.
Bud shook his head. “No, we’re in a good frat.”
“That remains to be seen,” Len said.
Bud and Cujo glared at him. Decided I had more questions. “Seriously, no one’s mother named them after a Stephen King killer dog or a beer. Real names, dudes, now.”
Bud grinned. “I’m Barnaby Ramsey, he’s Carlton Shepherd.”
“Better. We can go back to Bud and Cujo now. So, what team are you two on?”
“Football,” Cujo said. “On scholarship. I’m on special teams. Bud’s a running back.”
“Called it.” Okay, so they weren’t exactly the same as Len and Kyle, but they were damn close. “Bud, you said that the Casey-Bot exploded because I didn’t fall for it. You have any more on that?”
He shrugged. “If we’re going with her being some kind of robot or android or whatever, then she was programmed, right?” Most of the room nodded. “So, those chicks are right—she acted weird when the cops weren’t around. When they were, she was all raving. When they weren’t she was just quiet and sitting there on her bench.”
“Like she was turned off,” Cujo added.
The ragged man who’d thanked us for getting them chairs leaned forward. “The boys are right. I’m Mickey and this is Garfield,” he indicated the other homeless man. Chose not to demand their last names or anything else—they weren’t in any condition for me to be snarky or hard on them. “We were watching her ’cause she was interesting.”
“She didn’t try to talk to no one,” Garfield said. “She didn’t even look at the other girls.”
“She looked at the men?” Chuckie asked.
Mickey nodded. “She looked us over once or twice while she was sitting but that was it.”
“She smirked at us,” Garfield said, sounding offended. “Like she was so superior. But we wasn’t roughed up by the cops when they brought us in. We went like gentlemen.”
Mickey nodded emphatically. “We did. We don’t argue with the police doing their jobs.”
Melville heaved a sigh. “Mickey and Garfield are regulars, Kitty. So are Star, sorry, Jane, and Rhonda. Meriel, it’s her first time in.”