Page 38 of Radar (Iniquus Certified Cerberus Tactical K9 #2)
Xander
Sunday
Washington, D.C.
Thinking back to the complex series of events that Radar had processed through at Cerberus as they did the training evolution, Xander decided to let Radar manage Elyssa’s room. And so, he simply said, “Radar, take good care of her,” before closing the door.
He walked three paces to the only other door on the corridor, tapped, and was let in by White.
“Okay, Xander,” she said, reaching out to touch his sleeve, “I didn’t say anything about it in front of Elyssa, but what have you got smeared on you?”
Xander pulled the fabric around. “The lady sitting on the aisle seat was eating a tuna sandwich when we got the initial jolt, and she grabbed at me.” He reached into the front of his pack and pulled out wet wipes to clean himself up.
“Tuna on a plane?” White asked. “Rude.”
“Well, it seemed fishy.” Xander’s joke fell flat. “Planes first, what the hell was that?”
“Not the Zorics,” Hiro said.
“Well, that’s good, I guess.” Xander tossed the spent cloths into the trash.
“I was tracking you in, for no good reason, and when you got over the Potomac,” Finley pulled out a chair and sat, “your flight path became erratic.”
“You don’t say.”
“Xander, it was stressful as hell,” Hiro said.
“I can’t imagine how frightening that was, given the recent crashes in this area.
And while our team uses sarcasm to deal, this time you have to let Finley flow through this information because we have a bunch to get through, and I don’t want Elyssa to change her mind about talking to us and just get up and walk out the door.
She owes us nothing. But we need her badly. ”
“Go,” Xander said.
“White, why don’t you take point on this?” Hiro asked.
“The traffic alert collision avoidance system, TCAS, is set up to enhance the pilots’ situational awareness and is supposed to prevent mid-air collisions.
When, for example, helicopters in D.C. are flying around without reporting to the tower, the tower can’t watch how they interact with the airplanes.
This backup system should help. When a situation is picked up by the system, it provides a warning and can also instruct the pilots on what to do to stay safe. ”
“And the TCAS told our pilot to bank hard right?” Xander asked.
“It told four airplanes to descend. One did descend because that plane had the space to do so safely. The other three, including yours, did not. Not seeing the threat but hearing from TCAS that a mid-air collision was imminent, each pilot did what they could to save their passengers’ lives.”
“Heroic,” Xander said. “What he did was off the books, and from what I could hear and see, he executed it masterfully. The guy was a fighter pilot for damned sure. What did we avoid?”
“Yeah, about that. You missed nothing. The TCAS gave false alerts because the Secret Service and the Navy were over at the Naval Observatory testing anti-drone technology.”
“Despite the FAA warning them not to,” Hiro grumped.
“The anti-drone tests were done on L-band, which is the same spectrum band as TCAS. It created ghost planes that TCAS tried to save you from hitting.”
“Does everyone know about L-band and TCAS?” Xander asked. “I mean, given our Zoric mission and what happened in Newark, that seems like a vulnerability.”
“And that’s that?” Finley asked White. “Secret Service said, ‘Whoopsie?’”
“They promised they wouldn’t do it anymore,” White scrunched her nose with disdain.
“It’s getting to the point that I’m terrified to fly,” Hiro said. “I’m taking the damned train.”
“Obviously, anti-drone equipment needs to be tested, especially after Ukraine’s genius attack on the Russian nuclear-capable bombers.
But come on! Do it in a desert somewhere.
” Xander said. “It's pretty bad when you can’t tell if you’re getting dumped out of the sky because of a family of psychopaths, a rogue state, or just plain dumbassery.
I’ll be honest with you, when we were tilting over, I thought for a minute that one of Russia’s magnesium incendiary devices made it past the dogs and I was about to get chargrilled. ”
“The private channels to Moscow worked,” Hiro said.
White tapped the table in front of Hiro. “We think,”
Hiro turned to her. “They just got a conviction on four guys.”
She tipped her head to show she was not convinced.
“All right. I don’t need to know anything more about the plane. What’s next? Let’s start with the article Hiro sent me. It calls her Elyssa Kalinsky.”
“Landers is her married name,” White said, opening a file and handing it over to Xander. “She uses a hyphen, which probably didn’t show up well on the driver’s license when you were using a red light while doing your post-coital investigations from bed.”
Xander ignored White’s poke. Her sense of humor could be acidic. “Elyssa’s married, then?” He kept his gaze studiously on the papers, which were genealogical tables dating back to the mid-1800s.
“Divorced,” White corrected. “She was married for three years. Actually, and possibly interestingly, she filed for divorce the week after that article came out.”
“Husband couldn’t handle her success?” Xander asked. He picked up one stack and set it aside. The second stack had Elyssa’s lineage.
“I didn’t do a deep dive,” White said. “Finley pulled her vital records and did a quick search of what’s out in the public sphere.
I was flipping through, so the dates stood out to me.
Mostly because two months later, she signed a contract with Orest Kalinsky’s foundation.
She stopped working on the Spoons of Hope project for WorldCares, though her project is still active, and instead began working on a more ambitious project building vertical farms for Orest’s foundation. ”
“What is all this?” Xander asked, sweeping his hand over the papers, just wanting the punch line.
“After your text, telling us you were sleeping with the enemy, our genealogists did a quick look-see. We’ve been mapping the family and their connections, and no one remembered an Elyssa in their research.
The team compared Elyssa’s family to the Zoric-Kalinsky family branch, and she is not on it.
As far as we can tell, she’s not even in the same forest. So, at least for the last five generations that they looked at, Elyssa has zero family ties to Orest Kalinsky,” White said.
“Then why in the world would she call him uncle?” Xander asked.
“Your guess is as good as mine.”
Xander put his fingers on the sheet. “And there’s Medved’ Zoric.
We were in the field and not part of the analytical team, so let me make sure I understand.
The genealogists followed all of these branches?
They know the connections even of the people who are not in direct lines with Orest and Medved’? ”
“They did. Elyssa’s not in the Zoric line, and she’s not a Kalinsky.
” White paused. “Let me rephrase. She is a Kalinsky. Elyssa’s great-great-grandmother was born in Kalin and came to the US with her child, Elyssa’s great-grandfather, Heinrich Kalinsky of tin spoon fame.
Elyssa just isn’t related to the Orest Kalinsky line.
There’s no possible way that they have any blood in common for at least six generations back on his side.
Their families merely come from the same geographical area.
But it’s like saying everyone with the same last name is from the same family tree. ”
“Which you, in particular, don’t want,” Finley said.
“Me?” Xander looked up to catch Finley’s gaze.
“She’s also got some Belov on her recent family tree,” Finley said as White reached out, shuffled the papers around, pulled one forward, and pointed.
Belov was a low branch on that family tree.
“F’ing hell.” Xander pulled his hand down his face. “Did I just sleep with my cousin?”
“Man up,” White said. “Just drop the F bomb already.”
“Duty to a vow. So no,” Xander said. “Did. I. Sleep. With. My. Cousin?”
“Same scenario as with Orest: Same name, no connection,” Hiro said. “I looked because Habsburg jaw and all.”
“Careful, brother,” Xander said. “I put up with it from White because she can kick my ass. But I won’t stand that from you. How do you know my family tree? Is that the typical way the DIA looks into its hires?”
“The DIA was involved in a case recently where the Prokhorov family tried to destroy Delta Force.”
Xander nodded. “I read the files.”
“One of the side players that isn’t in that file was a guy Raine Meyers was tracking at that time, a guy named Todor Bilov.”
“And I’m I related to that guy?”
“While you and Anna are from the same Bilov family, this guy was not. We had to look.”
“Because you used Anna’s family connections to infiltrate the Zoric family, you all thought I might have that kind of in?”
“You’re grateful we looked before. It made it easy to let you know you’re not sleeping with your cousin,” Hiro said. “Which is a good thing.”
Xander reached into his pack for his water bottle. His mouth was the Sahara. “The plane was a Secret Service goof-up. Elyssa doesn’t have evil running through her blood. She and I aren’t related,” Xander said, unscrewing the top. “Next?”
“Onward then,” Finley said. “I have information out of Fairbanks FBI and Foggy Bottom, and the two go hand in hand.” He passed a page toward Xander. “This is the entirety of the box and Dr. Tapper conversation from Orest’s phone call from his room in Lumberjack.”
Xander took a swig of water before pulling the paper over. “This doesn’t edify anything. It’s just two guys agreeing on boxes.” Xander slid the page back to Finley.
“The box conversation makes perfect sense in terms of the criminal events that followed,” Finley said. “It tells us that Orest Kalinsky was an architect in the kidnappings of Claude Burns, aka Paca, and Eddie Baylor, and the attempted kidnapping of Elyssa Kalinsky-Landers.”
Xander accepted the map that Finley pushed his way.