“I’ll ping Freya Jotun, and introduce the two of you, this afternoon,” Carter offered. “She’s head of the IPD in that sector. She’s a good one. She’ll work with you.”
“Excellent.”
“So IPD New Headquarters is pretty much finished with the case, except for some mop-up work?” Ashton asked.
“Unless something goes wrong, yes,” Daggert affirmed.
That night, after sending Paul off to bed with the help of Cally’s parents, Nick and Cally retired a bit early. Alexandre and Linda Ames retired to their own condo with smiles, careful to close the doors connecting Paul’s bedroom with the rest of his parents’ condo, leaving the door to their own bedroom open.
“Well, lover-boy,” Cally said, once she and Nick had climbed into bed, “it looks like you’re free for the foreseeable future.”
“It looks like that, yes,” Nick agreed with a grin. “Did you tell your nanites to switch off the birth control?”
“I did.”
“Then let’s get busy.”
He tackled her, taking her down to the mattress, where he planted a deep kiss on her that left her breathless.
“Oh damn, is this gonna be fun,” she decreed.
Complications
Cally was some four months into her second pregnancy – this one was a girl, and they’d decided to name her Leya Elaine Ashton, after Nick’s mother’s name, and Cally’s mother’s middle name – when General Daggert contacted the ‘spy case team’ once more.
“I’m not really sure how it happened,” he noted once everyone was assembled in the VR conference room once more, “but it seems that there was a misdirection on the files transfers at Carolina. The person we picked up in the Annalia embassy as receiving the files not only shows nothing came through the inbox, but the lie detector chair confirms he has no idea what we’re talking about. He’s innocent.”
“Damn,” Carter cursed. “But that means…”
“That the real spymaster knows we know,” Peterson said. “And probably knows we rounded up their spy ring here on Sintar.”
“Right. Which further means,” Daggert continued, “they’ll be setting up to try again. So instead of cleaning their clocks, we set ourselves up for an inevitable second, and more subtle, attempt.”
“Shit,” Ashton grumbled.
“What if we took the fight to them?” Peabody wondered.
“How the hell would we do that?” Stone asked.
“Same way we did it for Conrad,” Peabody said. “Get somebody undercover at Carolina, preferably in the embassy.”
“Have we got anybody on site that we can do that with?” Stone wondered, and both men looked at Carter and Ashton. Ashton shrugged and turned to Carter.
“You have a better feel for the sector departments,” he noted.
Carter pondered for a long moment, then checked out in VR for several minutes.
“No,” he said. “I just contacted my sector chief in Carolina, and he says there’s not much way to pull anybody in that they wouldn’t recognize from the local IPD.” He shook his head. “Apparently the Annalian embassy is prone to throwing noisy parties with plenty of alcohol, so…”
“Aha,” ICPD Chief Quan said, in a knowing tone. “They know all the local cops on sight. The hard way.”
“Right.”
“I guess we need to send somebody,” Mercer said. “Shit. I’d volunteer, but I was in the Emperor’s coronation, and my image has been all over the Empire…”
“Well, our three best, most experienced acting sorts, among IPD and ICPD combined, are Adrian, Cally, and Nick,” Peterson pointed out.
“Yeah, but Adrian is busy working with our new up-and-coming almost-detective, Rick Honda,” Stone noted. “And Rick is using him to help on an active case.”
“How serious?” Carter wondered.
“Pretty serious,” Peabody noted. “Enough where, if he didn’t have Adrian there, one of us would have been with him. He’s trying to lure a serial rapist-slash-killer into the light. Think a modern Jack the Ripper.”
“Ugh, that one,” Carter said, pulling a face. “No, we don’t wanna mess with that pairing right now. If we tip off the killer, we’re back to square one on the case.”
Ashton and Ames exchanged worried glances.
“Well, that leaves Nick or Cally,” Peterson said, matter-of-fact. “Or both.”
“Um,” Ames began, then threw a pleading glance at Ashton.
“It’s kind of a bad time, guys,” Ashton explained then. “See, we hadn’t said anything yet, but…”
“Leya Elaine Ashton will be along in about four, four and a half, more months,” Ames finished for him. “I’m just starting to have to adapt my clothes for the baby bump.”
The room erupted in happy congratulations.
“Well, that lets them out,” Peterson said with a shrug. “Maybe we can wait a few months?”
“Let me see what I can determine,” Daggert said with a nod.
But it turned out, they couldn’t.
“…Because it looks like it was the ambassador himself that was the actual recipient,” Daggert told them. “So he was able to make it look like one of his underlings. Evidently he had a setup like we do in the Palace, where if a staffer dies, we get notification – it’s how we knew about Vasilisa Medved’s death quicker than the IPD a few years back, Detective Ashton, Detective Peabody, and beat you there – and when we executed Ms. Conrad, he knew she was dead, and the nanite system reported how she died. So he knew we were on to him right away. He’s already left Carolina, en route to Annalia in the embassy’s private spacecraft, along with about half a dozen of his staff… meaning the rest of the ring.”
“Shit,” Peterson cursed. “They got away.”
“Not necessarily, Maia,” Carter said. “Oh, they got away from us, but probably not from justice, not in the long
