“We’d like a private room,” he said, flatly. Blake’s Pizzeria had nine private rooms, all cleared by the CIA. There had been rumours that some of them were used for adultery and other matters that wouldn’t be approved of, if they came into the light. “And we’d like the menu.”
As soon as they had ordered, they went into the private room. It was the nicest secure room in Washington, at least outside the President’s bunker. The tables were neatly decorated, with enough condiments to suit any taste — and the staff had no access to the room, save through a dumb waiter. Toby knew better than to take that for granted, however, and he ran the improved model of Gillian’s detector around the room. There was one bug on Jason’s neck, which he removed neatly and dumped into a sealed compartment. Given the nature of the alien bugs, it seemed likely that any number of them were lost without any human interference at all. Or so they hoped. There was no way to know for sure.
“We’re as clean as we can be outside Fort Meade,” Toby said. He ran the detector over the pizza when it arrived too, just in case. “What have you discovered?”
Jason hesitated, and then plunged right into the story. “One of the aliens wants to defect,” he said. “He said that the world was in terrible danger.”
Toby blinked in surprise. He hadn’t expected that — but then, why would anyone expect an alien race to be a united entity? The human race wasn’t united. There wasn’t even a union of democratic states that could be counted upon to put the best interests of their people first. Why should the aliens have a monoculture? Having the vast gulfs of space certainly suggested that different cultures could have some elbow room.
His second thought was that it was a trick. “What assurances did he offer?”
“He warned me that everyone in the Welcome Foundation is under surveillance at all times,” Jason admitted. “They watch us everywhere, no matter where we go. He said he couldn’t give us much more without revealing his intentions; he’ll give us what we need to know when he’s safe on Earth.”
Toby swore under his breath. Defectors on Earth were handled under a series of largely unwritten rules. A defector who made it to a safe country was legally safe — although that hadn’t stopped the KGB from sending assassins after various Russian defectors during and after the Cold War. The Russians couldn’t demand that a defector be returned or vice versa — but that might not apply to the aliens. They had overwhelming power; if they knew that one of their people had defected, they might demand his immediate return on pain of planetary bombardment. And there was nothing the human race could do to deter them.
And yet… did they dare pass up the opportunity?
He scowled as he took a bite of his pizza. If it was a trick, the aliens might intend to allow them to take the defector and accept a great deal of false information at face value… or they might intend to turn the defection into a crisis they could use as an excuse for war. But why would they provoke a crisis so soon? If they waited for a year or two before coming into the open, humanity would be in a far poorer position to resist them; hell, they’d have a puppet in the White House. Logic suggested that the defection was real — but that might be just what the aliens wanted them to think.
“We need to know what he knows,” Toby said, slowly. He was starting to feel an odd flash of sympathy for the CIA officers who’d found that they blamed for every disaster that had ever struck the intelligence service. It was easy to do nothing if one developed a risk-averse culture, where the risks threatened one’s employment. “I’ll have to give it some thought. Do we even know how to hide him from them?”
“He suggested that it would be possible to fake his death,” Jason said. He swallowed the final piece of a pizza slice and took a gulp of coke. Toby had ordered coffee. “He seemed pretty sure that they wouldn’t look for him very hard…”
“Scratch that,” Toby said, flatly. “They will search for him. A dead body would tell us all sorts of things about him. If someone — one of them — dies on Earth, they’ll want every drop of blood returned. I’ll have to give it a great deal of thought.”
Jason nodded, sourly. “What should I tell him?” He asked. “He seemed pretty eager to talk to us quickly.”
“Tell him that we are considering how best to extract him,” Toby said. He shook his head. Extracting a Russian officer from Russia would be easier than trying to trick the aliens into believing that one of their people had died — and his body had been completely destroyed. A thought occurred to him and he made a mental note to look into it. If something were to happen at sea, the remains of an alien body might not be found at all, at least for some time. “And ask him if he wishes to take up water sports.”
The plan slowly came into focus in his mind. He would have to talk to his father — and some of his father’s friends — about it, but it would allow him to kill two birds with one stone. There were a number of SEALS who had been planning to fake their deaths; with a little work, they could vanish alongside the alien defector and never be seen again — at least until the shit hit the fan. And it would. Toby hadn’t doubted it ever since he’d looked into an alien pair of eyes.
“I don’t understand,” Jason said. “Water sports?”
Toby grinned. “They’ve been to see art galleries and museums and exhibitions,” he said. The aliens — those who seemed willing to visit Earth — spent half of their time playing tourist. The remainder of the time was spent making ambiguous statements to human interviewers. Why shouldn’t one want to try out Earth’s water sports? Their distant ancestors had probably crawled out of the water, just like humanity’s distant forbearers. “Maybe one of them would like to go sailing.”
He pushed the thought aside and turned to other matters. “Did you see the internet spam message?”
Jason nodded. The message — warning of the dangers of alien pod people and human politicians who were in league with them — had gone viral on the internet. Every attempt someone had made to wipe it had only spread it further, with copies being distributed right around the world. A number of politicians were embarrassed — although McGreevy, he remembered, hadn’t mentioned it when she’d been trying to seduce him to her side. It wouldn’t be in character for her to pay any heed to the message.
“I don’t think I’m a pod person,” Jason said, clearly anticipating Toby’s suspicions. “But would I know if I was?”
“I don’t know,” Toby admitted. There were plans afoot to snatch Joe Buckley and learn what they could from a scan of his mind, but the shadows who’d been attempting to follow him everywhere had lost him. Buckley had been in the military. He probably knew how to spot and break a tail. “I just don’t know.”
He shook his head. “I’ll get back to you as quickly as possible with the plan,” he said, grimly. “If we can get this guy out, it’ll be worth it. Even if he is trying to lie to us, at least we’ll know what they want us to believe.”
“I think he was quite nervous,” Jason said. “Time is running out.”
“It always does,” Toby agreed. The aliens had put one of their people in a very high place and they probably had influence over the remaining military officers. It wouldn’t be long before they made their move. “It always does.”
Chapter Twenty-Five
Washington DC
USA, Day 47