They passed stalls with German shepherds, Dobermans, Rottweilers, and several other working-group dogs she didn’t know names for. Alex kept to the middle of the long pathway between kennels and didn’t touch anything. Always best to minimize the number of fingerprints for wiping down later.
There were two small hound puppies sharing a stall, and Kevin mentioned to Daniel that they were Lola’s offspring, gesturing to the bloodhound tailing Alex.
“Oh, Lola, huh? Sorry,” Alex murmured, too low for the men to hear. “I shouldn’t have assumed.”
Lola appeared to know she was being addressed. She stared up at Alex hopefully, and her tail pounded against Alex’s leg. Alex leaned down quickly to pat her on the head.
Kevin made a disgusted sound and she straightened up to see him staring at her.
“Lola likes everyone,” Kevin said to Daniel. “Great nose, poor taste. I’m trying to breed out the lack of discrimination while keeping the olfactory genius.”
Daniel shook his head. “Enough already.”
“I’m not kidding. I expect better instincts from these animals.”
Alex squatted to scrub her fingers along Lola’s sides like she’d seen Daniel do, knowing it would drive Kevin crazy. Lola immediately rolled over, offering her belly. Abruptly, the giant dog lay down on Alex’s other side, and she was nearly positive he was also looking hopeful. She carefully patted his shoulder with one hand, and he didn’t bite it off. His tail beat the ground twice. She took that as encouragement and scratched behind his ears.
“C’mon, Khan, not you, too!”
Both Alex and the Great Dane ignored him. She twisted down so that she was sitting cross-legged with both dogs in view and her back to the brothers. If she was going to be surrounded by furry killing machines, she might as well have a few of them on her side.
Lola licked the back of her hand. It was disgusting, but also kind of sweet.
“Looks like Alex has a fan,” Daniel said.
“Whatever. Over here is where we keep the chow. Arnie picks it up every other week in Lawton. We’ve got most of what we need for…”
The rest of what Kevin said was lost in the yips and grumbles of the dogs left behind.
She stroked the dogs for a few minutes more, not sure how they would take it when she quit. Finally, she rose cautiously to her feet. Both Lola and Khan were quickly on all fours and seemed totally happy to follow her as she walked back to the house. They escorted her right to the door and then made themselves comfortable on the porch.
“Good girl, good boy,” she said as she went inside.
Kevin had probably meant to intimidate her, but she liked the way it felt as if the dogs were actually looking out for her, rather than keeping an eye on her. She supposed it was what they were trained for. It was a comfortable feeling. If she had a different lifestyle, it might be nice to add a dog. Except she didn’t know where she would get a dog-size gas mask.
Arnie was on the couch in the great room, parked in front of a flat-screen TV that was mounted on the opposite wall. He had a microwave dinner in his lap to which he was assiduously applying himself; he didn’t react to her entrance.
The smell of the food – macaroni and Salisbury steak – had her mouth watering. Not a four-star meal, but she was really hungry.
“Um, do you mind if I help myself to some food?” she asked.
Arnie grunted without looking away from the baseball game. She hoped it was an affirmative, because she was already en route to the fridge.
The refrigerator – an impressive, double-wide stainless-steel affair – was crushingly bare. Condiments, a few sports drinks, and a supersize jar of pickles. It also needed to be cleaned. She checked the freezer drawer and there found pay dirt: it was stuffed full of dinners like the one Arnie was eating. She heated a cheese pizza in the microwave and ate it on a bar stool scooted up to the island. Arnie seemed completely oblivious to her presence the entire time.
If you had to add another person into the equation, Arnie wasn’t half bad, really.
She heard the men coming back, so she headed upstairs. They’d all been forced into close quarters on the ride here, but now that there were rooms to retire to, it was possible to give one another some space. She knew Daniel and his brother had a lot to sort through, and there was no reason she needed to hear any of it.
There wasn’t a ton to do in her storage room. She refilled her little acid syringes, though she couldn’t think of a scenario where she would need them here. She could have worked on harvesting the kernels out of her peach pits, but she’d left them in the barn. It wasn’t worth taking the chance to try to connect to the Internet, just in case she was going to be here for a while, and she didn’t have any reading material. There was one project she’d been thinking about, but part of her violently rejected the idea of writing any of it down. Though national security hadn’t exactly been her friend for a while, she still wasn’t going to put the public in danger. Writing her memoirs was not an option.
But she needed to think it all through in an organized way. Maybe if she just wrote some key words to help her remember?
She was sure of one fact: Something she’d overheard in the six years she’d worked with Dr. Barnaby had been the reason for the lab attack and for every assassination attempt that had followed. If she could pinpoint the information involved, she would have a much better idea of who was behind the murder agenda.
The problem was that she’d heard a lot of things, and all of it was insanely sensitive.
She started to make a list. She created a code, designating the biggest issues, the nuclear ones, as A1 through A4. Four big bombs that had been controlled during her tenure. Those were the most serious projects she’d worked on. It would have to have been something of the gravest nature to merit destroying her section.
She hoped. If it was some petty whim by a cheating admiral who thought he might have been mentioned in an investigation, she had no chance of ever figuring it out.
T1 through T49 were all the non-nuclear terrorist actions she could remember. There were minor plans – ones that hadn’t come to much – that were slipping through her memory, she knew. The major plans, T1 through T17, ranged from biological attacks to economic destabilization to importing suicide bombers.
She was trying to come up with a system to help her keep all of the different actions separate (the first letter of the city of origin plus the first letter of the target city? Would that differentiate the events enough? Would she forget the meaning of her notations? But listing the full place-names was too much information to commit to writing) when she heard Kevin calling for her.
“Hey, Oleander! Where are you hiding?”
She snapped her computer shut and walked to the top of the stairs.
“Did you need something?”
He came around the corner and looked up at her. Both of them held their position, keeping the length of the stairs between them.
“Just a heads-up. I’m taking off. I left a phone with Daniel. I’ll call when I’m ready for you to send the e-mail.”
“Prepaid disposable?”
“This ain’t my first rodeo, sister.”
“Well, good luck, I guess.”
“Don’t turn my house into some death lab while I’m gone.”
Too late. She suppressed a grin. “I’ll try to rein myself in.”
“This is probably it. I’d say it was a pleasure…”
She smiled. “But we’ve always been so honest with each other. Why start lying now?”
He smiled in return, then was suddenly serious. “You’ll keep an eye on him?”
She was slightly taken aback by the request. That Kevin would entrust his brother to her this way. And even more shocked by her own response.