by Rene Fomby
So I’m hunkered down now, watching the front of the building like Max, my Great Pyrenees buddy. But, to be honest, there’s not much to watch, really. The Dunkin’ Donuts shop is getting way more traffic than the consulate building. And it’s not even breakfast time.
Oops. That was a big mistake. One thought of breakfast, and already my stomach is grumbling. I knew I should have packed a snack before heading downtown this morning. Happens every time, you get busy—
“You see anything suspicious, Moose?”
Wha! I spin around, and immediately I see Tommy standing just a few feet behind me, leaning casually up against a pole. “How did you—”
Tommy is smirking at having caught me off-guard like that. “Just like I thought. Lost in your daydreams. What was it? Dreaming of a bone?”
No way I’m going to give him the satisfaction of answering his little sarcastic questions. And, no, it wasn’t a bone, I’ll have you know. It was a king-sized bowl piled high with canned food. With leftover tidbits from my humans’ dinner stacked up on top, I decide to fight fire with fire and go on the offensive, instead.
“Very funny. I knew you were there the whole time. Just couldn’t take my eyes off the entrance. And let the Russians sneak in while I was watching you instead.”
Tommy doesn’t seem totally sold on my story, so I shift gears. “So, more important at the moment, what if anything did you find out upstairs?”
Tommy’s still watching me askance with those squinty little eyes of his, and takes his time to answer. “The front door to the consulate is going to be a problem. They’ve got two-tiered security, a door up front and a single door leading to the back, with a no-man’s land in between. Or a no dog and no cat land in this particular instance. So that kinda puts a kibosh on trying to sneak in the direct way. And the fourth floor, that’s a little too high up for scaling the walls and climbing in through an open window, even for a cat. Which leaves us with only one remaining option.”
“Yeah, what’s that?” I ask, now fully intrigued.
Tommy tells me there’s apparently some kind of dumbwaiter that runs from the basement all the way up to the top floor. Too tiny for even the smallest human to squeeze in for a ride up to the consulate, but more than big enough for the two of us.
I shrug my shoulders. Do we really have an alternative, here? “Let’s ride.”
Ecuadorian Consulate, 3:00 p.m.
A
s it turns out, catching a ride on the dumbwaiter isn’t as easy as Tommy first made it out to be. First of all, the button to send the thing up is mounted on the wall outside, and the door to the dumbwaiter has to be closed and locked before it will operate. That meant we had to rig up a way to push the button even after we were locked inside of the thing, but after a series of trial runs using some string, an old mop and a stack of boxes, we were finally able to get it all to work. Kind of reminded me of my old Irish Setter buddy, MacGyver. Sometimes in these situations you just have to be resourceful.
It was kind of tight inside the little elevator, Tommy being a bit larger than your average alley cat, but a long minute or so later the dumbwaiter finally came to a stop on the fourth floor, and we unlocked the door and jumped out.
We catch a big break at this point—as it turnsout the dumbwaiter opens up inside a small snack bar near the back of the consulate, and no humans are standing around at the moment to see us suddenly pop out into the room from a hole in the wall. Tommy immediately rushes to the door leading into the hallway to peek out, making sure the coast is clear, then turns back to discuss next steps.
“Okay, the big question now is, where are they hiding Julia Strange?”
“I don’t see how we can figure that out from in here,” I suggest in a low voice. “Since we’re at the very back of the consulate, I guess our best course of action is just to move forward, slowly and cautiously, until we see something that looks suspicious. If we’re spotted along the way, then my recommendation is just to own the situation, act like we’re supposed to be here, the way Tony taught me how to ride the elevated trains and buses.”
“I like that,” Tommy whispers back. “You know, Moose, we might just make a secret agent out of you, after all.” He pauses to glance quickly back out into the hallway. “Okay, out of here and to the left. If our plan does fail and everything goes topsy turvy for us out there, let’s plan to meet up back here and we’ll see what we can figure out with the dumbwaiter. I saved some extra string for us, just in case.”
Tommy goes first, slipping soundlessly into the hall with me following right on his heels. Coming to the first open doorway, he slides an eye around the bend, then shakes his head and, pointing a paw straight ahead, darts quickly past the door. I follow in quick pursuit.
We repeat that maneuver several more times before Tommy finally pulls back sharply from scoping out a room, a big smile spreading across his face. “Bingo! It’s her. Julia Strange in the flesh!”
My legs suddenly go all tingly on me. You gotta love it when a plan finally comes together. Tommy slips across the doorway and pauses on the other side, gazing back at me. Holding up three outstretched claws, he counts down three, two, one, and then we both rush the room together, Tommy stopping for just a brief moment to close the door behind us. One thing I learned the hard way long ago—privacy is precious at a moment like this.
Julia Strange’s Suite, 3:15 p.m.
O
ther than our target, Kitty-Leaks empresario Julia Strange, we’re all alone in the little room. There’s a small bed set up in one corner, and a pile of Chinese takeout gathering roaches on a table off to our right. Strange is scrunched up in a La-Z-Boy recliner, watching a home-flipping show on television, and doesn’t even notice us as we slip in to the room.
Tommy points to a laptop computer —or is it a lapdog top?— sitting on a nightstand beside the bed. Moving quicker than I ever thought was possible, he snatches it off the nightstand and stashes it away deep beneath the bed, where only the two of us have any chance of getting to it without moving all of the furniture in the little room around.
With Strange’s only apparent connection to the outside world—and, more specifically, the Internet—now fully neutralized, it’s time for us to introduce ourselves to the enemy.
Tommy goes first, pushing off against the night stand in a long arching leap that lands him squarely in the middle of her lap. Strange starts to erupt with a long and almost certainly very loud scream, but Tommy slams both front paws over her mouth, stifling the noise. Meanwhile, I come racing around the La-Z-Boy and jump right up on a coffee table sitting between her and the blaring television.
Now that I’ve got a closer look at her, I’ll have to admit she’s not all that bad appearance-wise, if you happen to have a thing for grumpy-looking marmalade cats, that is. She has chocolate, almost black paws and ears and a matching chocolate face, but the rest of her is more like white chocolate. Her face is all smashed in, flat even for a cat, and her eyes are staring right at us with almost no white showing around the edges.
Meanwhile, Tommy’s wasting no time getting into it with her, switching to Doglish, which she at first pretends not to understand. But of course she has to be pretty fluent in American Doglish, since she’s evidently been in constant contact with the Russians about all of our pee-mails. And, not to overstate the obvious, she’s a dog. Finally, realizing we’re not buying in to any of her heated denials, she caves in.
“What do you want?” she demands in a thickly accented voice. “Why are you here? Are you connected to the Wolfhoonds? To Vladimir Kitin?”
“Do I look like a Wolfhound to you, lady?” I ask while Tommy is frantically motioning for me to shut up. Too late I realize that he might have wanted to play along with the whole Russian angle, just to figure out what she does and doesn’t know. But I guess that’s lost to us now. Oops. Time to shift to Plan B, I guess. I only hope Tommy has a Plan B.
One thing he does have is an ample inven
tory of claws, really big claws, and he has them on full display right now, hovering just inches from her nose.
“Ever heard of cat scratch fever, Ms. Strange?” he asks, waving his left paw menacingly in front of her face. I must say, he’s got that whole menacing thing down to a science by now.
“What—what do you want from me? How—how did you get inside?” Strange’s eyes are darting wildly from side to side, searching for an escape route, and then they suddenly settle on the nightstand. And the missing laptop.
“What—what did you do with my computer?” She starts looking around wildly again, but this time it seems she’s worried about something other than making a quick escape. Tommy’s smiling devilishly. He clearly knows something about playing with frightened little mice. Just before he kills them and eats them whole. And alive.
“Perhaps I should introduce myself, madam. The name’s Tuxedo. Tommy Tuxedo. Agent Double-O Nine, licensed to kill. And if you don’t start telling me everything I need to know, I might just have to take full advantage of that license.”
Her eyes have stopped moving and are now drilling straight into his. “Double-O? You’re from PETSEC—”
“Yes. And right now I’m your very worst nightmare,” Tommy growls. “So—the pee-mails—when are the Russians planning on delivering them to you? And when were you planning on releasing them to the general public?”
“I don’t have the slightest idea what you’re talking about,” she answers, indignant. “You two certainly have the nerve, barging in here uninvited, demanding things from me. Stealing my laptop! Why, I have half a mind to—”
“Clearly you have only half a mind, or you never would have gotten mixed up with the Russians in the first place!” Tommy’s acting all nonchalant right about now, but he knows as well as I do that a human could prance through the front door any moment now and the jig would be up for us. I decide to help him out.
“Hey, Tommy, now that we’ve got our hands on her computer, why don’t we bug out of here and haul it down to the lab to have Q’ute’s people hack into it? I’m sure Ms. Strange here has all kinds of secrets loaded up on that little baby that she’d like to keep to herself. And then meanwhile we can do that little trick you like to use to seal her up in this room tight as a tick, where the humans won’t be able to break her out for at least several days.” I glance over at the empty Chinese food boxes. “She’s got plenty of water in the toilet over there in the bathroom, but she might have to miss a few squares. No big deal, but what dame doesn’t want to lose a few extra pounds, anyway?”
I see a twinkle in Tommy’s eyes from my mention of his special expertise in sealing up a room. Something that doesn’t actually exist, but she doesn’t need to know that.
“No! You can’t!” Panic is finally starting to settle in with our dear new friend, Julia. “I—there’s information on that computer that—they’ll kill me if any of that ever gets out!”
Tommy just smiles and starts playing with his claws. “Save me the drama, Strange. You didn’t seem to be all that worried about keeping secrets when it was our lives on the line, eh?” He gives me a little side wiggle of his head. “Let’s take our stuff and blow this pop stand, Moose. Can’t wait to see what she’s so all-fired worried about.”
Julia is in complete panic mode by now. “No! No, I’ll tell you! I’ll tell you anything you want to know!”
Tommy considers her through tightly slitted eyes. “Okay, Ms. Strange, I’ll give you just one minute to come clean. Twenty questions, okay? Three seconds each.” He holds up one claw. “When exactly are you expecting the Russians?”
She’s shivering now. Or shuddering. Either way, she’s struggling to get out the words. Finally, Tommy makes like he’s about to leave, and she breaks down completely, a heaving mess curled up like a doodlebug in the bowels of the recliner. “Stop! They’re—I’m supposed to meet them downstairs in the lobby at five o’clock. Precisely. That’s when they’re supposed to hand over an SD card or thumb drive loaded up with all the pee-mails they downloaded.”
“And what were you supposed to do once you got them?” Tommy demands, holding up a second claw.
“I—I’m supposed to hand over all my media contacts and my list of Internet bloggers, all the people I’m releasing the pee-mails to sometime tomorrow afternoon. Just in time to make the late night news cycle.”
Tommy is chewing on his lower lip, thinking and mumbling to himself. “Hmm. Five o’clock. That might just give us enough time.” He looks up. “Okay, here’s the deal. Moose and I will take your laptop with us for insurance. We’ll meet up with you down in the lobby just before five with further instructions. You do exactly as I say, and you’ll get the laptop back, no questions asked. Sabe?”
“I’m sorry, I didn’t get that last part,” she replies in between generous bursts of tears. “I’m already sobbing, can’t you see that?”
“No, I meant—oh, never mind.” Tommy motions for me to get ready to bug out. “Just be sure you keep that big snout of yours shut tight, and meet us downstairs on schedule. If you can manage all that, we’ll give you back your laptop in one piece. And you might just get out of all of this in one piece yourself.”
She nods that she understands what he’s asking her to do, then I focus on keeping her distracted while Tommy retrieves the laptop and darts out the door with it, heading straight for the dumbwaiter. As soon as he’s clear I give her a short two-finger salute, and then I’m out the door right behind him, racing at full tilt for Q’ute’s high tech lab.
Once we’re back on the street, Tommy stops for a second to tap on the right side of the weird blue collar Q’ute had given each of us back at the lab.
“Q’ute Branch, Tuxedo here. We’ve made contact with the Himalayan and are returning to HQ with a special package for your prop heads to tinker with. Meet us there. And I’m going to need you to bring along a couple of extra trinkets if you can…”
Fat Tony’s Office, 3:45 p.m.
W
hen we finally reach Fat Tony’s office, the big cat is nowhere to be found. But an aide from Q’ute Branch is already there waiting for us, and leads us back to the underground lab through a hidden doorway and elevator on the opposite side of the building from the secret entrance where we entered the last time. And I can’t tell you how glad I am we don’t have to pull that whole plummet into a net thing again. My right leg is still wincing from the last time.
Q’ute is standing just outside the elevator when the doors slide open, looking absolutely stunning in a blue jumpsuit, her Coke bottle glasses and a pair of white cotton gloves. Tommy immediately hands over the small laptop computer we stole from Julia Strange’s room.
“We managed to ‘borrow’ this for a while from that little Himalayan slimeball, Julia Strange, and I’m willing to bet my hind legs it’s chock full of secrets we can use to neutralize her going forward. Think your people can figure out a way to clone it before we have to make our way back to the consulate?”
“Not a problem,” Q’ute assures him, handling the computer carefully by the edges. “And I’m absolutely delighted to see she chose this particular model. It’s quite popular with the ‘in’ crowd these days, even though it’s really pretty pedestrian. But it sports two very interesting features that make it particularly easy to crack.”
“Yeah? What’s that?” Tommy asks, leaning over to examine the laptop from just inches away.
Q’ute smiles impishly. “Well, for starters, it’s secured by a pawprint reader, which users seem to like because it makes it much easier and faster to unlock.”
“But we don’t actually have one of Strange’s paws—” I start to protest.
“No,” Q’ute agrees. “But this model also features a beautiful and shiny stainless-steel cover. And unless Mr. Tuxedo managed to smudge the entire surface of the laptop’s cover on your way over here, I’m willing to bet—” She holds the computer up at eye level and sideways to the light. “Just a
s I thought. Several perfectly pristine pawprints, both top and bottom. We should be able to unlock this sweet baby right away, no problem, and simply copy the contents of the disk onto our servers. No decryption needed.”
Tommy looks pleased. “And how long will that take? We don’t have much time…”
Q’ute hands the computer to her assistant, who drops it carefully into a clear static-free evidence bag. “Don’t worry. It shouldn’t take more than fifteen to twenty minutes, tops, including the trip to the computer lab and back.”
“That’ll work out perfectly. Just so long as we leave nothing behind to warn her that she’s been compromised, that we’re privy to all her secrets. So, one other thing. I called ahead—”
Q’ute stretches out a paw to pat him lightly on the shoulder. “Rest assured, Double-O Nine, my team is already hard at work loading up several USB thumb drives with mock-ups of official PETSEC National Committee emails. And another one that has all the extra features you requested. They’ll be ready long before you have to leave for the consulate and the meet-up with the Russian spies.”
“Good. Sorry. I’m just a little bit on edge about all of this.” Tommy flashes Q’ute what is probably the most conciliatory look I’ve ever seen from him. Ever.
“No problem, Nine. I think we’re all sitting on the edge of the fence top on this right about now. We have very little margin for error in any of this. One little mistake and—”