Alien Research

CHAPTER 4

EVERYONE AT MY TABLE stopped eating and stared at me, looks of trepidation on every face.

Other than Jamie, who was thankfully playing with her Poof, Mous-Mous, while eating. Naomi had cut up all her food into perfect little bites, which was more proof of how much Jamie adored her. She hadn’t allowed me or Jeff to cut up her food for months because she could do it herself and normally wanted to. She might only be eighteen months old, but she was advanced in a lot of ways, and this was merely one of them.

Mous-Mous came along wherever Jamie went, and since Poofs looked like fluffy balls of fur with ears, paws, and big button eyes, but no tails, it appeared that Jamie was playing with a stuffed animal. A stuffed animal that could go Jeff-sized and toothy should danger appear, but a stuffed animal at this size, nonetheless. The Poofs had been outed along with the rest of us, but even so, they tended to pass as stuffed more often than not.

My new special caller chuckled and dragged me away from the momentary enjoyment of watching my daughter innocently playing “one bite for me, one bite for you” with her pet. “That’s right.”

“Going to give me your name?”

“Not yet. You’ll know me soon enough. Enjoy the rest of your day.” With that he hung up.

Stared at my phone. “Well, that was fun. Threatening calls, they’re great for the digestion.”

“We shouldn’t discuss it here,” Abigail said. “Just in case we’re being watched for our reactions.”

Surreptitiously looked around. No one seemed to be paying us any attention.

“We need to finish up,” Naomi said. “If they’re calling you, you know that means they’ve got something else in motion.”

Everyone nodded and we went from enjoying our meal to speed eating. The Gower girls and I didn’t use hyperspeed—them because it wasn’t wise to do so out in public, me because I wasn’t really good with eating at non-human levels just yet and didn’t feel like having syrup smeared all over my face, or hair, or worse.

We’d just finished up, Jamie included, when a group of businessmen and one businesswoman came in.

Len, who was on my other side and watching all the entrances, stiffened. “This can’t be good,” he said quietly.

“Who is it?”

He shot me a look I was familiar with—the “why don’t you ever read the briefing materials” look. “The heads of Gaultier Enterprises, Titan Security, and YatesCorp.”

“Oh. Right.” Yeah, they did look vaguely familiar. “Or, as we call them, our own personal Axis of Evil. This morning just keeps on getting better and better, doesn’t it?”

Naturally, said Axis were looking directly at us. They all smiled. I now knew exactly how a sea lion felt when faced with a group of great white sharks.

Sure enough, they headed straight for us.

“Ambassador Katt-Martini,” the lead Land Shark said. “How fortunate that we find you here.”

“Is it?” I’d avoided meeting all these people in person, but this was definitely Ansom Somerall, who was the current acting Chairman of the Board of Gaultier Enterprises. He was about six-two, average build, normally attractive. He had a full head of silver hair, but he was only in his mid-fifties.

“Of course,” Somerall replied with what I was sure he felt was a charming smile. “Fortunate for me to get to be in the company of four beautiful American Centaurion ladies.” He made sure to look at each of the females at the table, including Jamie.

Resisted the urge to snarl or gag, since he’d included my toddler in this smarmy come-on. Sure, my husband had used similar lines on me when we’d met—but Jeff had charm up the wazoo and Somerall definitely didn’t, at least not as far as I was concerned. Rumor said Somerall fancied himself a ladies’ man. Since, in addition to my husband, I knew the Ladies’ Man of Ladies’ Men—Naomi and Abigail’s older brother Michael—I could come down firmly on the side of Somerall not having anything close to Jeff’s game and being merely a pretender to Michael’s throne.

Of course, when you considered the company Somerall tended to keep, perhaps he was the best choice of the bunch, which was a textbook example of damning with faint praise.

Behind him stood a taller, thin man, with thinning light-brown hair and glasses. He was sort of stooped. It made him look both somewhat unassuming and also kind of creepy. From what Amy had told me, the unassuming part was an act, but Quinton Cross had creepy down to an art form.

Cross smiled. It was, like the rest of him, both unassuming and creepy. Moved him higher up on my Latest Enemies Trying to Destroy Us list. “As Ansom said, of course it’s fortunate, Ambassador. We have a mutually beneficial proposal to discuss.”

“Really? And you think right now—when I’m out with my daughter and clearly already occupied with my friends and Embassy staff—is the appropriate time? Especially since I was under the impression you were supposed to be having a meeting with someone else associated with our diplomatic mission—Amy Gaultier-White.”

That meeting was why Amy wasn’t with us at breakfast. Wanted to send her a text and make sure she was okay but couldn’t really take my focus away from the Land Sharks.

Standing just a little apart from the men was an attractive woman in her mid-forties. She hadn’t seemed fazed by Somerall’s come-ons, or Cross’ creepiness, so either she was used to them, or they didn’t bother her. Maybe both, but I figured on the former.

Janelle Gardiner had her long, dark hair done up and was in all green. Wasn’t sure if she was matching her eyes today or if green was “her color.” People in D.C. seemed big on the “your color” idea. Based on my experience in this town, I pegged her as the likely Brains Behind the Posturing Sharks.

These three were the power on the Gaultier Enterprises board and were the main people Amy was fighting for control of the company her father had built. If they were here, looking for me, they weren’t here for a social call.

Gardiner shook her head. “That meeting was rescheduled because of this new issue. It’s time-sensitive, Ambassador. We’d never disturb you without an appointment, otherwise.” She smiled. “Lillian Culver would never let me live it down.”

Lillian Culver was the top lobbyist for some of the biggest defense contractors, including but not limited to Titan Security. She and I weren’t friends but, thanks to my “uncles” the assassins, we now had a good working relationship based on the fact that Culver knew that if she really went against me, those “uncles” would kill her and her husband, Abner Schnekedy, without a moment’s hesitation or remorse. As I’d learned early, it was good to have friends in both the high and the low places.

Looked around. “Where is Lillian? Since you’re dropping her name to get me to chummy up and all that.” I wasn’t asking because I liked Culver, but this was the kind of group I expected her to be at least ushering around.

“She’s at the Capitol,” Gardiner said. “Doing her job.” Which probably meant pressuring my husband to do something against our better interests. So that was business as usual.

Managed not to ask how Gardiner knew what Culver was up to. Gaultier Enterprises wasn’t a defense contractor of any kind, but their ties with Titan ran deep, and if you were in with one big defense firm, you were also in with Lillian Culver.

Of course, after Operation Assassination, Titan should have been out of business permanently. But as I’d also learned early, evil never truly died, and Titan was back in the game. They weren’t quite back to what they’d been when Antony Marling had been alive and in charge, but their future was again looking bright.

And the man who’d brought Titan back from the dead and into that brave new world of financial success and government love was now stepping forward, the better to give me a friendly grin I didn’t buy for a New York Minute.

Of course, him stepping forward meant that Kyle felt it was time to stand up. Len followed suit.

“Ambassador, we haven’t met, I’m—”

“Thomas Kendrick. I know. We get the papers at the Embassy.” And Chuckie had done his best to make sure every single person in the Embassy could recognize these people on sight. Even I, who admittedly hadn’t really read these specific briefing materials, knew who Kendrick and the rest were. Sure, I knew them because Len had told me who they were just now, but now that he had, my memory had happily shared some facts.

“I’m flattered,” Kendrick said politely. He eyed the boys. “I can assure you, the Ambassador is in no danger.”

Kendrick was former military, and it showed. He had that crisp, buttoned-down, and above all, intense look that a lot of former military possessed. We had a lot of military working with us, and even my flyboys, who were considered the biggest jokers around, could pull off this look in a nanosecond if it was called for. Maybe it was something you learned in basic training or officer’s school. But whatever it was, Kendrick had it in spades.

Kendrick’s father was an American former Marine and his mother was Vietnamese, so Kendrick was also quite good looking. He’d been appointed into Titan by the Department of Defense, and that meant he might be good on the inside as well as the outside. But I doubted it. In my world—the one where people tried to kill or control me and everyone I loved on a regular basis—anyone high up in these three companies was automatically suspect until proven to be Evil Incarnate. So far, that viewpoint had never been wrong.

“Then it won’t matter that we’re standing up just like you, will it?” Len asked mildly. Kyle shifted so he was directly between the Land Sharks and Jamie. Noted that Naomi was texting, but other than being happy that one of us could multitask right now, wasn’t sure that this was going to help.

Kendrick shrugged. “Suit yourselves. Ambassador, if we could speak with you privately, that would be best.”

Wondered if Len and Kyle were having Operation Destruction flashbacks right about now and figured they were. Me, I simply braced myself for more doctored dirty pictures and forged ahead. “Would it? Then I guess you should have made an appointment. Right now, if you want to talk, we’re doing it here, in front of everyone. But I do have a question—how did you know I’d be here?”

The last man standing was Amos Tobin, the person now in charge of all of YatesCorp or, as I thought of it, the House That Mephistopheles Built. He’d only recently been appointed to run things by the YatesCorp Board—they, like Gaultier, had taken their sweet time about choosing the official successor to Ronald Yates. Even before he’d joined with the Mephistopheles parasite, Yates had been a tough act to follow, especially if you were into evil plotting and so forth.

Tobin was a mogul in his own right—he’d run a variety of successful businesses, including starting several successful fast-food franchises. Before YatesCorp he’d also successfully dabbled in companies focused on publishing, music, and art. So he had the bona fides for the job.

He was a nice-looking, middle-aged black man, just starting to show some paunch around the middle. Unlike the others, though, Tobin was going for a more folksy look. Oh, sure, he was still dressed in the standard suit and tie, but it wasn’t D.C. standard. He was in black on black, with a Stetson, bolo tie, and cowboy boots, all in black as well. It looked good on him, in a sort of Southern Godfather way, but I prepared myself for the inevitable bad joke.

Tobin smiled. “Ambassador, you may not realize it, but you make the news regularly. We saw you’d had some . . . unpleasantness earlier, knew you were headed here, so figured it was a good time to come see if we could help each other. You know good guys wear black.” He had a faint Texas twang, and my memory shared that was his home state.

And there it was, right on cue. “Usually we add in some white, just for contrast.”

Tobin chuckled. “I’m sure you do. May we join you for breakfast? My treat.”

Had to give Tobin this much—at least he was trying to put this into a more friendly, normal-person atmosphere. It wasn’t working, but at least he’d given it the old college try.

Of course, we’d already eaten, and the evidence of such was still on the table. So either he wanted us to eat again, he wanted us to watch all of them eat, or he was offering us a really cheap bribe.

On the plus side, or sort of, none of them sounded like the man who’d just called me. That didn’t mean one of them wasn’t the new Club 51 Head Honcho, but it was unlikely. This didn’t mean they didn’t know him, though. When we’d first run into our favorite anti-alien lunatics, Howard Taft had been the man in charge. But he’d been taking his real orders from Leventhal Reid, who’d been a Representative from Florida. Suppressed the shudder thinking of Reid always gave me. I’d seen a lot of evil in my time with Centaurion Division, but no one and nothing, not even Mephistopheles, had matched Reid.

The Land Sharks were looking at me expectantly. We didn’t have a lot of options. We had no car to race off into, we couldn’t use hyperspeed to run away no matter how much we might want to, and we needed to pay our bill one way or the other. Plus, we were officially making a scene in a restaurant we frequented. Yeah, they’d planned this really well.

Decided to go on the offensive. “So, you’re telling me that we were on the news in some way?”

“No,” Somerall said quickly. “We all have sources, Ambassador. Just as you do. Ours told us you’d been attacked by some dissidents. And while you go out on random days, when you do go out, this is where you tend to go.”

Good to know we were predictable. That was the downside of having a favorite restaurant.

“Okay. Well, that sort of begs a question.” They all looked at me with interest. Here went nothing. “Which one of you wants to tell me who the new head of Club Fifty-One is and why he’s decided to start threatening me?”