Page 34 of Radar (Iniquus Certified Cerberus Tactical K9 #2)

Xander

Sunday

Fairbanks, Alaska

Xander had settled into his seat on the transcontinental flight. They’d be here for the next nine hours. Luckily, the elder sitting on the aisle seat was small, and she liked dogs.

The overhead pinged, and the flight attendant began her spiel about trays and seat backs in the upright position.

To learn a bit more about Elyssa’s specialization, Xander was pulling up a book on tape about the future of food production in a warming world when a message dropped.

Hiro – As discussed, Elyssa took advantage of the offer to switch to a different airline. She’s boarded. Seat is in first class. Did you see her get on?

Xander – Negative. I saw her get on the electric cart from her original boarding area. I hightailed it over here. Radar and I were first to board. I didn’t want Radar crushed in the crowd. Took advantage of loading with special needs.

Xander – I can’t see forward because they pulled the curtain between us plebes and the upper class. Her boarding was visually confirmed?

Hiro – Confirmed. Chicago's flight, BTW, was further delayed due to the Ottawa threat.

Hiro – Attaching an article for background.

Xander opened the link to find a newspaper article.

Global Times Register

Alexandria, VA.

When Doctor Elyssa Kalinsky walked across the stage in New York City to accept the prestigious Hastings Award for Innovation in Agricultural Technology, she brought a tin spoon with her to show the audience.

Holding it aloft, Kalinsky explained, “This was my great-grandfather, Heinrich Kalinsky’s spoon.

He carried it with him in his pocket the day he and his mother fled what is now known as Kalin Slovakia (the Slovak Republic during World War II).

He was only five years old, but the stories of his early days of intense hunger stayed with him for the rest of his life.

That spoon inspired a different kind of journey, a journey of intellect and curiosity that caught the world’s attention.

Dr. Kalinsky, 27, while pursuing her doctoral degree, engineered Spoons of Hope, a modular, self-sustaining food production system capable of growing fresh produce year-round with minimal water usage and no soil.

It is also animal- and disaster-resistant.

Her innovation is up and running as a WorldCares pilot program in five East African food deserts, which were caused by changing weather conditions, overgrazing, political unrest, and an influx of refugees.

From a Difficult Past to a Hopeful Future

Doctor Kalinsky's great-grandfather, Heinrich Kalinsky, escaped the Nazi-occupied Slovak Republic in 1942. As German troops moved into the village of Kalin. Sadly, the family became separated in the chaos. Heinrich’s father and brother were left behind as resistance fighters smuggled Heinrich and his mother out of the area.

Mother and son eventually found their way onto a boat headed to the United States, where they had distant family members living in Pennsylvania.

They arrived malnourished and unable to speak the English language.

In high school, Heinrich worked on the family farm.

Later, he opened his own grocery store, which he ran alongside his wife, Ruth.

Growing food everywhere for everyone.

Dr. Kalinsky’s Spoons of Hope pods are built on the idea of sturdy minimalism and are shipped to the sites where they are needed, snapping together like a children’s toy without the need for tools.

The design is intuitive, allowing the pods to be assembled without concern for language or literacy barriers.

“What Dr. Kalinsky has achieved is revolutionary,” Dr. Carmen Brandywine, spokeswoman for WorldCares International, said.

“In a world facing increasing dangers that lead to food insecurity, such as climate change and regional conflict, her work offers the possibility of a scalable solution, providing local populations with fruits and vegetables to help provide for the nutritional needs of people in crisis.

From Lab to Lives

In a refugee camp on the Syrian-Turkey border, Mohammed shows off his handful of tomatoes and cucumbers that he obtained from the movable farm.

He said, “While we still wait for rice and lentils from the WorldCares trucks, we now grow our own herbs and vegetables to make the meals better for our health and happier for our minds. Happier for our hearts.” Dr. Kalinsky visited a similar site in drought-impacted Ethiopia earlier this year.

“I'll admit that seeing my concept in the field helping people made me cry. While this award is exciting because it will bring my design to the notice of more people, more organizations who may want to implement a Spoons of Hope module, but the biggest thrill for me was seeing children eating the food that they grew through my system.”

Back in Kalinsky’s lab, her great-grandfather’s tin spoon sits on her bookcase where she can see it and remember the human impact of something as simple and necessary as healthful food.

The little girl who remembered hearing her great-grandfather’s stories of starvation and trauma has now dedicated her life to reducing the number of children who might someday tell the same kind s of stories around their future kitchen tables.

Xander read the article three times, and it made absolutely no sense to him that this woman, who was part of the Zoric family through the Kalinsky bloodline, was on board with the Zoric plot.

No sense at all. None.

In this article, Elyssa was a world-class science hero.

Start with the name — Dr. Elyssa Kalinsky. The name on her driver’s license was Elyssa Kalinsky Landers. Xander opened his photo file and looked at the picture he’d taken in his room in Lumberjack.

Kalinsky-Landers, hyphenated, he hadn’t seen that in the dark.

Kalinsky was not her middle name, but a maiden name. Married.

Did Elyssa seem like the kind of woman who would have an affair?

There were no rings. The friends didn’t make any references to her husband—or her wife—she could be bi—. But Eddie had frequently referred to his fiancé, Benny. Claude had mentioned his wife and children. And Elyssa had said nothing at all about her relationship status.

Married. Huh.

Not only had he slept with the enemy, he’d screwed somebody’s wife.

He was going to Hell.

Before he realized that Elyssa was a Kalinsky, working with one of the architects who helped make the doomsday machine a reality, he would have read the article and recognized Elyssa in the journalist's words. He would have imagined all of that was true.

The hope that was sprinkled like pixie dust throughout the entirety of the article was the way that Xander had sensed her.

Sunny, warm, self-sufficient, brainy, kind-hearted—Xander cut himself off before he added enthusiastic and flexible in bed.

Under the circumstances, he wanted to distance himself from those memories.

Was all that a well-designed persona? Something that she showed the reporter and the men that she met when traveling far from home?

That was certainly a skill set that the Zoric family possessed: a smile on your face, a knife in your back.

She had given him the correct phone number. Would she have done that if she’d just violated her marriage?

There were all kinds of marriages, not everyone believed in monogamy the way that Xander did.

He had never slept with a married woman—never slept with a woman that was in any kind of relationship before, and he didn’t like the way that sat in his chest. “Tricked into immorality by the Zoric vixen,” he muttered, and it felt like a false narrative.

Tradecraft 101: Never assume.

One could gather data and develop a theory, but to create a narrative from the name on her driver’s license was fallacious thinking.

Until he knew something definitively, he’d let that go.

Married or not, it didn’t change the fact that Elyssa had used her doctoral studies to feed the world.

Xander: Is Elyssa working for WorldCares now?

Hiro: She runs her own lab. It’s funded by the Carpathian Foundation for Scientific Advancement. Orest Kalinsky’s foundation.

Shit.

Xander knew from Anna that Orest had been gathering science for William Davidson to use as he developed survival systems on Davidson Realm. And in Bratislava, Anna had specifically mentioned an interior vertical farm in the volcanic chimney.

Had Elyssa been working on that part of the Zoric escape plan the whole time?

Was the foundation using the Spoon Full of Hope initiative to maintain international goodwill and encourage other bright and promising up-and-comers to sign up to pursue science?

And would they know—did Elyssa know—that their science would lead to death and destruction for others while providing thriving-survival for a select few?

If they did know, it would take a certain level of duplicity that Xander could not put together with the evening he had last night with Eddie and Pacca. The ready smiles, the good-natured teasing.

Radar was the key.

Xander could be duped like every human being. Though he prided himself on being in the kinds of danger for enough years, with a wide variety of cultures, where language barriers meant he watched for the tiniest nuances that would lead to a better-than-average ability to read a person.

But still, Xander was fallible.

Radar, that was a different story. You can’t fool a dog as smart as Radar.

He could smell a bad guy a mile away. He’d had his eyes on that guy Elyssa had named Gaston.

And that morning, when he saw the man get off the snowmobile, Radar was primed for the fight, standing on the desk and rumbling his chest as he looked out the window.

Before there was any real sign that Elyssa was endangered, Radar had thrown his body against the door trying to get to her.

Radar had been hyper-vigilant and hyper-protective of Elyssa from the get-go.

She wasn’t the bad guy here. Xander truly believed that.

He thought back to White’s admonishment that he sleep, which hadn’t happened. But White was right, Xander needed a clear mind. And this flight was going to be his chance to get some shut-eye for whatever came next.

With the arm up between their seats, Radar was curled up, his head resting in Xander’s lap.

Xander put a protective hand over his best friend’s head, closed his eyes, and passed out.