by Rene Fomby
Tommy had sent one group of commandos into the alley around back to seal off the rear exits, and two other teams are positioned off to the left and right to execute what Tommy called a “pincher” movement, whatever that is. My job is to maintain my observation point behind a large mailbox while the rest of the team dashes across the street and into the tearoom. The element of surprise is key here. Any advance warning that we are coming could have very dire consequences. Very dire, indeed.
As the team leaders flanking the front entrance signal they’re ready, Tommy checks for cars, then holds up one paw for a second before bringing it down sharply and racing across the street, with his attack team in hot pursuit. Almost immediately they are dashing through the front door, with the rest of the commandos moving to cover the entrance, and instantly earsplitting screams start to erupt from inside the small restaurant. I desperately want to know what is going down inside, whether our team had gotten themselves caught in some kind of ambush and were being sliced up by the Russians, but Tommy had made my duty crystal clear. Hold down the mailbox at any cost.
In the end, it was all over in less than a minute. Almost the very same moment Tommy and his team had rushed the front door, humans began to shove their way free of the small tearoom like their butts were on fire, screaming and pointing and racing in every direction at once. It was all I could do to sort through the whole madhouse scene to make sure none of the Russian Wolfhounds were trying to take advantage of the craziness to somehow try and slip past me. But that wasn’t going to happen, not with me on the job!
Anyway, almost before the raid started, it’s over, and Tommy is throwing open the front door of the joint and stepping out into the light with a deep scowl plastered on his face, his tail tucked tight against his legs. I know without asking that something had gone terribly wrong with the raid. Terribly wrong, indeed.
Fat Tony’s Office
W
e are all gathered around the conference table back at PETSEC’s temporary new headquarters to debrief on what Tommy had learned from the aborted raid.
Tony can’t believe what he was hearing. “Nothing? You got nothing? How is that even possible?”
That would have been the first question out of my mouth, if I’d been running the debrief. We had top-notch intel placing the Russians inside the tearoom, but when the raiding party blasted inside, there was no trace of them whatsoever. Just a terrified handful of humans, who had up till then been peacefully enjoying tiny little pots of tea before all heck broke loose inside the restaurant.
Tommy is scowling down at the table in front of him. “It isn’t. I mean, our intel from the transmitter was unimpeachable. The Russians left the meet-and-greet with Julia Strange and went straight to the tearoom. Q’ute assures me there was no mistake about that. But when we executed the raid, when we got inside the place, there was no sign whatsoever that the Wolfhounds had ever been there. And believe me, we checked. We checked behind every door, pulled up every rug, turned over every speck of dust. But we found nothing. Nada. By the time the human cops showed up we had all but pulled up the floorboards in the place. But not one single hint that the Russians had ever been there.”
“But—but that’s impossible!” I’ve never seen Tony red-faced before, but now it looks like he might be ready to explode right in front of us. “The only way they could have possibly known we were raiding the place is—”
“We have a mole inside of PETSEC,” Tommy finished for him.
The news about a mole inside of PETSEC hit the room like that Churnable nucular plant Q’ute told us about yesterday. The one that got to Vladimir Kitin and his family.
“A mole?” Tony’s face has somehow managed to get even redder than before, if that was even possible. “How can that be? We got no moles in PETSEC. I—I don’t even know if I’d recognize one if I saw it!”
“Well, on the surface they look kinda like a particularly ugly form of mouse or rat,” some aide suggests from the back of the room. “Except they’re mostly pretty blind, and hide out underground for almost their entire lives, where their diet consists almost exclusively of earthworms. But I can’t imagine why they’d be at all interested in PETSEC’s presidential election…”
Tommy is shaking his head, fully irritated now. “No, no, not an actual mole, you fools. I’m talking about a spy. A spook. Somebody the Russians have planted inside our organization to keep tabs on what we’re up to. That’s the only way they could have known about the raid in time to bug out of the tearoom before we got there.”
“It makes sense…” Tony’s chewing on his lower lip now, lost in thought. “And that could also explain how they figured out how to decrypt all the pee-mails. A spy inside of Q’ute’s organization…”
Tommy’s face looks like it could kill something all on its own. “Which means they probably have access to all of the other high-tech gear Q’ute Branch has been putting together for us. Once again, the Russians don’t have the actual smarts to create any of that state-of-the-art technology, but they’re more than capable of stealing it from us and copying it all at will.”
The table got quiet for a moment, and I took that as my cue to butt in. “All of this is very interesting, but what the heck do we do about it? If there’s a spy working for Q’ute, how can we possibly hunt him down before the election? And if the Russians are still running around Chicago free and clear, how do we keep them from causing even more mischief? We’re running out of time on this, folks!”
Tommy’s face seems to clear a bit as he stares up at me, catching my eye. “Moose is right. As bad as this new bit of info is, we don’t have time to deal with it directly right now. We have an election to save, and if we screw up that particular mission, mole or no mole, it just won’t matter anymore. So, any thoughts?
I clear my throat slightly to get everyone’s attention. “Uh, Tommy? Tony? Given the situation here, don’t you guys think we should break up this meeting and huddle up together in an executing session?”
Tommy manages to smile at that, although I don’t really know why. “Executive session? Actually, Moose, that is a splendid suggestion. I should have thought of that myself.” He sticks his left paw out and waves it around the table. “Okay, everybody, back to your day jobs for now. Let’s clear out the room. Moose, Tony, the three of us need to talk in private.”
Tony’s head is slowly nodding as he works through all the detailed implications of Tommy’s plan. “So right, I agree, we can all assume Q’ute herself isn’t the mole. But everyone directly below her is fully suspect, so we can’t trust any of them. And that goes for my staff as well.”
“And my own staff inside my company,” Tommy adds. “In fact, other than the three of us—and Q’ute, of course—we have to assume everyone inside of PETSEC is a potential undercover agent for the Russians. And the Crimson Canines, for that matter.”
“But we need to keep that fact to ourselves,” I suggest conspiratorially. “I mean, that cat is already out of the bag, so to speak, after the mostly public debrief meeting, but surely we can do something to keep that information from spreading throughout the entire organization.”
Tony smiles back at me grimly, his canines flashing. “I’ll issue orders right away that if anyone says one word about having a spy among us, I’ll personally tie him inside a big canvas bag and throw his sorry butt into the Chicago River. That should do the trick.”
“Good.” Tommy is wearing a look like he’s done with all the talking and is ready to once again take command of the situation. “So we’ve got our assignments. Tony, you hold down the fort here. Moose and I, we have some field work to take care of. If there’s one thing we proved in spades in dealing with Julia Strange—there’s more than one way to skin a rat. Or, in this case, a mole.”
Q’ute Branch, Noon
W
e’re all huddled in a tiny room buried deep in the back of Q’ute’s top-secret laboratories, dozens of floors beneath the busy streets of the
Miracle Mile. Q’ute quietly double-checks the locks on the door, then flips a small red switch mounted on the wall right next to the door.
“This room is equipped with a SCIF, so anything we say will be kept completely confidential,” Q’ute explains, pointing to the switch.
“A Sniff?” I ask, completely perplexed. “You mean there’s like a big giant nose sucking all the air out of the room? That sounds pretty dangerous!”
Not for the first time, Tommy shakes his head at me. “No, Moose, not a sniff. A SCIF. We’re inside a Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility, filled with various electronic countermeasures to confuse any bugs that might be planted on us, or anyone trying to listen in from the outside.”
“Uh, I knew that,” I suggest. “Just trying to keep things light here…”
Tommy’s twitching whiskers are saying he isn’t buying it. Not one bit. “Right. Okay, then, let’s get down to business, shall we? By the way, thanks for setting this up at the last minute, Q’ute. It’s important that we talk to you in private. We—we think you may have a mole planted somewhere inside of Q’ute Branch.”
Q’ute’s eyes widen with alarm. “A mole? Oh my gosh! That’s impossible! I’ve personally vetted every single animal who works for me. In fact, I microchipped them myself. There’s no way—”
“And yet apparently there is,” Tommy interrupts. “Someone leaked the raid on the Russian tearoom, and when we got there, the whole place was clean as a cat’s paw. No sign of the Russians anywhere.”
“But that could have come from your team—”
“Not a chance. Tony and Moose were the only members of the team other than me who were informed about our target in advance. And I think you’ll agree they are both totally trustworthy.”
Q’ute eyes me kinda funny for a long moment, but finally shakes her head. “Okay, that makes sense, I guess. Although I really wish you were wrong about all this. The work we’re doing down here, it’s all extremely sensitive—”
“And now I think you can count on almost all of it being the property of SPECTER at this point. And probably at some point the entire Russian Government.”
“Which means that once we find the spy, we’ll have to chuck the whole shooting match down the chute and start working on creating new countermeasures for our own weapons. What fun.”
Q’ute is looking anything but happy right now, so I decide to try and cheer her up.
“Hey, the good news is, these high tech collars of yours really work! I especially like the way you put a little doodad in mine to open up my electronic doggie door!”
“Doggie door?” Q’ute mutters, still somewhat dazed. “No, we didn’t—”
Tommy leans in over the table, tapping the center of it with one paw for emphasis. “Our first order of business here is to find some way to neutralize the spy, and Fat Tony has a few interesting ideas along those lines. You know how that works, if you want to catch a thief, you gotta start by thinking like a thief, and if you want to catch a two-timing fink, well…”
I think that was intended as some kind of snide remark about Tony, which I think is kinda out of order right now. I mean, we’re all on the same team, here, so we gotta stick together until we see this whole thing through. I’m just about to say so when I realize Q’ute and Tommy have been discussing the details of the plan, so I lean in myself to try and catch up.
“…feed the spook some disinformation, to keep the Russians unsteady on their paws, get them watching left while we come at them from the right,” Tommy’s saying.
“Ah, the old double-triple-cross,” Q’ute notes with a sly smirk. “I like it, Tommy. Great idea. And meanwhile I can activate a little sniffer program on our primary communications conduits to see if we can trace the message back to the sender. Catch our little mole pink-handed, as it were.”
Aha! I knew my sniffer suggestion would come in handy at some point! I was just a little ahead of my time, I guess.
“Then we’re all set.” Tommy hops up and makes like he’s getting ready to leave. “You know what we’re up to over the next few hours, so I’ll leave it to you to concoct a believable lie and feed it to the mole. And Q’ute—” He gives her a very serious face. “We’re running out of time, here. Every minute is precious if we’re going to save this election and run the Russians out of town for good.”
“I hear you,” Q’ute answers, raising her ears just slightly to make her point. “I’ll have everything in place within thirty minutes. I could make it faster, but I don’t want to draw attention—”
“To the fact that we just had this secret meeting. Gotcha. Okay, thirty minutes it is. That’ll give Moose and I just enough time to get back to our temporary HQ and set everything in motion. And, Q’ute—thanks.”
“No need to thank me. If I hadn’t been so lax with security around here in the first place, you’d already have Vladimir Kitin and his goons locked up and headed back to Russia. Now I’ve just got to make it right. And hope that we’ve caught wind of this mole of mine in time to keep Boss Dawg from getting elected.” A shiver seems to run through her for a moment, then she runs her paws down the front of her lab coat, straightening it where it didn’t need to be straightened, and points toward the door. “You two should go first, so we’re not seen walking out of here together. I’ll hang back a few minutes longer and compose my false flag message.”
“Good idea.” Tommy nods at me, and we quickly unlock the door and find our way slowly to the elevator and out of the underground lab, making sure the entire time we aren’t being watched by the mole or any of his friends. The elevator ride to the top is strangely quiet as we both ponder what strange and dangerous developments lay ahead of us over the next few hours.
Ecuadorian Consulate, 12:45 p.m.
S
peaking of strange, on our way back to HQ Tommy suddenly got a wild hair to check up on our old friend from Kitty-Leaks, Julia. The Ecuadorian Consulate wasn’t very far out of our way, and he thought it might be a good idea to warn her that the Russians were still in the city. And that they might not be all that happy with her right about now.
As we turn the corner a few blocks down from the embassy, we can’t help but notice that the entire street seems to be filled up with police cars and ambulances. A mob of onlookers had formed, as they always do, so it takes quite an effort for Tommy and me to squeeze past all of the legs and feet to find out what had happened.
As we get to the front, a group of humans, mostly coppers, are all standing in a circle around something that had been covered up by a sheet. By the size and shape of it, I am pretty sure we were looking down at all that was left of Julia Strange.
“No one saw it happen, but it appears she must have jumped from that window up there,” one of the coppers is saying, pointing a pencil toward an open window on the fourth floor.
“What in the world would cause a cat like that to want to commit suicide?” another copper asks. “And why the heck didn’t it land on its feet?”
“Don’t know,” the first copper answers, pausing to write something into a small notepad. “And she ain’t got no collar, so there’s no ID on her. I put word out inside the building, but nobody’s claiming ownership of her. I guess we can write this one up to just another unsolved mystery. This city’s full of ‘em.”
Tommy motions for me to fall back, so we quickly turn and head left, toward Fat Tony’s office. When we finally make our way free of the crowd, he pulls me aside into a small break between two buildings.
“Guess we were too late, Moose. The Russians clearly got to her before we could. Probably steaming mad about what got released to the press.” He pauses a second to look back. “Our little bait-and-switch with the fake SD card turned out to be a killer idea after all, even if it didn’t lead us to the Russians.”
I wince a little at his pun. Too soon, I guess. But that got me to thinking. “Whatever happened to the little thingie with the secret transmitter?” I ask him.
“We found it inside the tearoom, near the back, out by the alley entrance. They obviously left it there to lure us in. I’m just surprised they didn’t plan an ambush for us when we finally showed up.”
“That suggests they didn’t have a lot of time, doesn’t it? That they had to bug out of the restaurant at the last moment? That might be useful information for Q’ute as she tries to track down the spy inside her lab.”
“Great idea, Moose! Don’t know why I didn’t think of it earlier. I’ll send Q’ute a secure message over the collarphone to let her know—”
Tommy gets busy for almost a minute tapping something out on his collar, then gazes up at me, one eyebrow cocked. “Q’ute says she already has a hot lead for us.”
“Already? It hasn’t even been thirty minutes yet—”
“No, not from the false flag message. She got a note from someone deep inside the Russian organization. A dame. Says she’s heard of your reputation and wants to meet up with us to hand over some files she’s managed to smuggle out of SPECTER. This could be the big break we’ve been looking for!”
“I don’t know, Tommy. It all seems a little—convenient, don’t you think? It might be a trap.”
“Yeah, Q’ute thinks so, too. But at this point, even walking into a trap might somehow lead us to SPECTER and help us crack this thing. So I guess we just gotta go into it with both eyes wide open. And keep a sharp lookout for any tasty morsels of cheese that are laid out suspiciously in broad daylight, just waiting to lure us in.”
“Okay, sounds like a plan. Although me and cheese don’t do all that well together. Lactose intolerant, you know. But alright, what are we waiting for then? Let’s hit it. Where did Q’ute suggest we should meet up?”
“At the Shedd Aquarium. There’s a new exhibit there that hasn’t yet been opened up to the general public. Q’ute’s sending over the GPS coordinates right as we speak.”