“Still with you, Nathaniel.”

I hoped so. My breathing, or Rawlins’ body’s breathing, was getting a little shallow. Remembering who I was pretending to be, I panted, “Slow down a little; I’m old, and I’m not going anywhere.”

“No, you aren’t,” the Rottweiler agreed darkly, “which is why we need to get you to move faster.”

“Look,” I tried, “if I fall over, the mall cops will get involved. Just slow down a little, willya?”

The big dog seemed to get the gist of this idea, and he slowed down, barely. Rawlins’ hindpaws seemed to want to tangle themselves up, and a few passers-by actually gave us a second glance. Part of me wanted to bolt, but that wouldn’t help me, Hunter, Rawlins, or anyone else. I took a chance and patted the Rottie’s arm. “Everett.” I spoke just a bit loudly. “I know you haven’t worked for the assistance program long. It’s okay. Let me lean on you a little; we’ll both go along better that way.”

Whatever else he might be, the big dog wasn’t stupid. He took my arm more companionably, saying, “Thanks for your patience, sir. We’ve got that car you asked for, and I thought you’d be anxious to get going.”

“Not too much rush; we’ll get there in time. They can’t start the party without me, right?”

He managed a laugh that was almost companionable, and the number of interested faces diminished rapidly. After another dozen or so meters, no one paid us the slightest attention. He leaned a little closer to my ear. “Good call. Good puppy.”

I could have done without the condescension; otherwise, the compliment was welcome. “Just trying not to get killed.”

That was all the conversation that the Rottie cared to make, and his Sheppie cohort didn’t seem big on joining in. It didn’t take long for us to get to the front doors anyway, and the Shep moved ahead to flag down a large car a little further down the drop-off area. I waited with my escort, leaning properly against him. He seemed to get into the role that I had assigned him. “Here we are, sir. Why don’t we get in the back? It’ll be more comfortable for you.”

“He didn’t use your name; don’t use his.”

“Yes, I’m sure it’s fine.” The Shep opened the door for me, and the Rottie folded himself in first, with surprising grace, then turned to help the doddering older dog to fit into the large space safely, making sure I didn’t bump my head, getting me nestled into the space before the Shep closed the door with a quiet, firm click. Smoothly, the other escort got into the front passenger seat, neat as you please. Anyone watching wouldn’t know that it was a kidnapping.

As the car moved slowly through the people who didn’t care that this was supposed to be a space for cars rather than pedestrians, the Rottweiler regarded me carefully. “I didn’t know you were so well trained.”

The blood in my host’s body chilled on my behalf. “What are you…?” I tried.

“What made you think to start acting?”

“Just trying…” I began, then started over. “Look, I just wanna get rid of that damned thumb drive and get back to my life, okay?”

Once more, it paid to tell the truth. My “assistant” nodded. “Fair point. We’ll just take that little thing off your paws and leave you alone.”

“You’re doing fine.” Miranda’s voice was welcome. “Just keep going. We’ve got you covered.”

The conversation in the car dried up entirely, and I tried to keep myself from guessing how soon we’d end up at Rawlins’ apartment. His own memories reminded me where he lived, and I knew it wouldn’t be long. I tried to think of how I’d get through this, just as if I had any idea how the cop show characters would handle it. The thing about those shows is that they’re written so that the hero always gets away okay. For all I knew, though, I was the character actor who might get killed so the real hero can take a justified revenge.

If I got through this, I promised myself that I’d never watch another stinkin’ cop show for the rest of my days.

We arrived on the block where the apartment building waited right where it had been when I left it… last night? Things happen fast when you’re not in your own body.

“Let them get you inside; we’re in place.”

The driver idled, flashers on, while Everett and Joachim (the Shep’s name finally came back to me) got me out of the car to escort me to Rawlins’ apartment. I climbed the short stoop and, like last night, my right forepaw punched in the correct code; this time, I made note of it, with the sense of finding it in Rawlins’ memories. I was getting more used to the idea, I supposed. I didn’t want to be, but it wouldn’t be for too much longer.

I hoped.

Given the size of my companions, I wasn’t sure we’d all fit in the elevator. Everett apparently had the same idea. Silently, he jutted a chin to the stairs, and Joachim made his way up the steps, two at a time, as Everett and I padded into the lift. I gave a thought to trying to tell Miranda what was going on. How could I give a signal? I pushed the “3” button, and the doors closed for us. No conversation on the way up.

The doors opened again, and the Shep stood waiting for us. He nodded. I never thought silence could be so annoying. Almost on auto-pilot, Rawlins’ body turned left toward 3R, took the keys out of his pocket, worked the lock.

“The drive and the spares are in place. Go inside. Stall for about five seconds. Don’t give in too quickly.”

Leading the other two, I padded into the middle of the living room space, looking around me. I didn’t feel like I was acting. The Shep closed the door behind us, and he and the Rottie looked at me, waiting.

“Okay,” I said. “Do you want me to just get everything, or…”

“You tell us where it is,” Everett’s booming basso, even when quiet, thrummed at me. “We’ll go get it.”

I nodded rapidly. “Yeah, okay.” Instructions blossomed in my head. “The empty drives are in their packet. Desk in the second bedroom.”

Nodding toward the hallway, I waited to see what would happen next. The bigger dog made his way there, leaving me with the lean Shep for company. He wasn’t keen on conversation, so I just stood there with him. After what felt like fifteen minutes but was probably about that many seconds, Everett returned with the pack of thumb drives in his forepaw.

“Space in the plastic for another drive,” he noted, “just like you said. Now, how about we reunite that lonesome green drive with its family here, and we’ll be on our way.”

The shifting from one hindpaw to the other wasn’t nearly as scripted as it might seem; it was more a natural reaction. “Look, I’ll give it to you, but how do I know you won’t just kill me, once you get it?”

Everett look downright hurt. “We wouldn’t do that to you, Trevor. That’s not how this works. You don’t need the danger of keeping the drive, and we don’t need the trouble of having to explain your body. Business is better if we don’t make too much mess for ourselves, right?”

“Well, yeah,” I temporized. “I just… you know, those cop shows and all.”

The Rottie actually chuckled at that one. “They aren’t all that accurate. Take the two of us, for instance. We’ve got concealed carry permits, in case the boss needs protection. We’re not carrying our weapons today, right, Joachim?”

“Only thing I’m packing is in my crotch.” The Shep finally spoke, and it was more disappointing than anything.

“You could probably kill me with your bare paws,” I said, quivering voice and all.

The Rottie padded a little closer. “That’s starting to look like a good option.”

“Kitchen,” I nearly squealed, backing away from him. Rawlins’ body was shaking enough for both of us, and his memories of Novak’s reputation made me ever more certain that I wasn’t going to get out of this easily, if at all.

Everett moved slowly, placing his forepaw to my shoulder again, almost tenderly. “Where in the kitchen?” he rumbled softly.

“Canister,” I managed. “Rice.”

His smile came slowly, seemed genuine. “You look like you need to sit down, Trevor. Can you get to the couch?”

I nodded franticly, eager to agree to anything he suggested. Rawlins’ body staggered a little, and the Rottie actually helped to steady me until I got to the couch and fell down on it. “Just relax,” he told me, his voice soothing. “I promise I won’t even make a mess.”

After the big dog moved away from me, I looked at the Shep, who still hadn’t moved. His face, ears, tail, all was set and still, as close to neutral as he could make it. I heard Everett in the kitchen, and I imagined that I could hear him taking out a large bowl, popping the lid on the canister, pouring out the rice.

“Comm check.” Miranda’s voice was soft, reassuring. “You’re covered, Nathaniel. Almost done with this bit.”

Everett returned from the kitchen, the green thumb drive between two fingers. “The rice thing is usually for tech that’s gotten wet. This one get wet?”

“No,” I managed. “It’s just where I thought…”

The Rottie nodded, sagely. “Might be a bit of rice dust or whatever in it, but that shouldn’t be a problem.” He looked to the Shep and said, “Joachim, let’s get this back to Mr. Novak.” To me, he said, “Thank you for cooperating, Trevor. I’d say, just lay back and rest a little. You’ve had a tough time, recently.”

And they left, closing the door softly behind them.

Rawlins’ heart was still upset with the encounter. I used a bit of relaxation technique to help the body get through the fear. I wasn’t sure it was safe to “talk to myself” yet, so I waited another 15 seconds.

“Are you okay?” Miranda asked. “Your covering team tells me that the car has pulled away. They’re gone.”

“I think so,” I said aloud. “Is it really that easy?”

“Two knocks, then one, then one more.”

Seemed I was getting more used to this. After a few seconds, I heard the pattern at the front door.

“Might be unlocked,” I said.

Entering quickly, Hunter replied, “It is now.” He signaled rapidly with his forepaws. “Get up. We’re leaving.”

“What’s…” I began. The sable had crossed to the sofa and was pulling at me to help get on my hindpaws. “…the hurry?” I finished.

“It’s time for lunch,” he insisted, “and I’m buying. Mind you, I’m all in favor of doing my own cooking, especially on a gas grill or oven. This apartment has one, doesn’t it?”

Rawlins’ memory brought up frozen dinners and boiled pasta. “I think so.”

“Far better than electric; better temperature control.” Hunter continued getting me to move. “Gas stoves do, however, have one important drawback.”

Despite this body still trying to get its own hindpaws tangled up with each other, my nose had caught a quick whiff, and my mind was rapidly sorting out what was happening. “How bad?” I asked.

“We’re working to minimize collateral damage.”

“Otherwise?”

“Let’s say Mr. Rawlins would not need to be recovering from a simple fall.”

In the hall, we got down the stairs as fast as I could make the dog’s body move, and we got out the back way again. The alley was somehow even less hospitable than it had been the night before. We’d barely made the street before an explosion behind and above us made me trip, falling, discovering myself being caught and supported by a surprisingly strong young female human. When I recovered my wits, I found myself looking into Kayleigh’s face.

“People will say we’re in love.” She grinned at me. “C’mon; we’ve got a van waiting just up the street.”

After a moment, I got Rawlins’ hindpaws back under me, and we made it quickly to the vehicle Hunter had pointed out to us. The side panel was open; I managed to get into the seat behind the driver, the sable after me, the human into the front passenger seat. Sirens sounded in the distance, and our driver began maneuvering us away from the scene before anyone could start cordoning off the area. I’d not met the raccoon before, but he seemed very sure of himself behind the wheel.

Still panting from the exertion, I turned to Hunter. “You’d better be providing one helluva good lunch.”

“I promise it’s not the mall’s food court.”

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Dickens House was not on my list of haunts, and I suspected that it wouldn’t have been on Rawlins’ either. The place was somewhere beyond genteel. I’m not exactly down-at-the-heel, but I’ve not had many opportunities to find, much less frequent, a place like it. Lots of dark wood, perfectly polished, accents of leather and brass, like the hunting lodges of fiction. It wasn’t snobbish, though. I felt absolutely shabby with everything I was wearing (including Rawlins’ canine body), but no one said a thing. Hunter took the lead, requesting a private table “for a very popular friend,” and we were shown to a particularly comfortable booth at the back of a dark, quiet dining room.

The sable sat across from me, accepting from the maître d’ what appeared to be a large board about 2cm thick, covered by luxuriously soft black leather. I tried not to bristle; humans still thought of non-sapients as things to be used. In this establishment, at least, the owners seemed to have appreciated what they had and tended to it well. Hunter passed the board to me. It was, of course, a menu. The cream-colored, linen-based sheet of paper, held in place by black elastic ribbons at the corners, listed a selection of appetizers, soups, salads, and entrees that was brief but wide-ranging. No prices were listed, which told me that the costs were probably astronomical.

“If you see nothing you’d like,” Hunter observed, “I might be able to suggest something, depending upon who’s in the kitchen today.”

Maybe I was still shaken by the most recent events of an already nerve-wracking 24 hours, but I found that I could barely make sense of what I was reading. The sable waited patiently while I pretended to consider. After a very long moment, I set the menu down and just looked at him. He smiled softly, turned to make some subtle signal, and a sleek black panther in full livery appeared at the table as if by magic. Hunter placed an order for both of us, and the panther took the menu from us and shimmered away.

“Nathaniel.” My companion’s voice was gentle, but the booth kept away other noise, and I heard him clearly. “You have had more shock and stress in the last few hours than many people have in a lifetime. Take into account that Rawlins’ body is not as young and fit as your own, that it is reacting more potently to the adrenaline and the physical aspects of your own emotional exhaustion. It all feeds back to give you what I believe is called, in medical terms, a metric shit-ton of anxiety.”

I managed a nervous chuckle in spite of myself.

“Lunch first. We’ll take our time. You’re safe here, and others are engaging the chase in other quarters.” He leaned forward to secure my attention. “I’ll tell you shortly, after we’ve had a chance to calm down a bit.”

“You seem plenty calm to me.”

“Training, experience, and an innate ability to pretend. As George Burns said, ‘The key to success is sincerity. If you can fake that, you’ve got it made’.”

I clapped a forepaw to the dog’s muzzle before I brayed with laughter. Some part of me recognized that it was hysteria that made that line funnier than it might be ordinarily, and I worked to restrain myself. I was able to regain some fake version of composure by the time that the panther returned with goblets of ice water and salad with cranberry and candied walnut. One forkful at a time, I started feeling better. By the time that the bouillabaisse and half-glasses of chilled Sauvignon Blanc arrived, I had regained what passed for “normal” in my current situation. Hunter explained the contents of my bowl: white fish (sea bass, at Dickens House), shrimp, clams, and mussels in a savory red stock, served over orzo “for heartier texture.” Slices from a fresh, still-warm baguette completed the table, and I was encouraged to use them get any bit of the broth that the spoon might miss.

Conversation paused long enough for both of us to discover just how well the chef had done for us. After a time, I managed to get the nerve to ask, “What’s next?”

Hunter set down his spoon to give me a serious answer. “The operatives who were watching your back at the mall stayed there to keep tabs on Novak. By this time, the miscreant will have taken the various thumb drives and slinked back to his lair, with the operatives tracking his every move.”

“What’s on that green thumb drive, anyway?”

“A puzzle that he’d have a hard time cracking.” The sable used a bit of baguette to its best advantage. “The four in the package are blank; the green one has several data files that are encrypted. Unless they have some particularly sophisticated decryption software, they’ll be stymied.”

I felt the dog’s eyebrows cross to show the confusion I felt. “What will they find if they open them?”

“Not sure,” Hunter admitted. “I think one of them contains some really great recipes for party dishes. Another might be porn, just to keep them entertained.”

My new expression must have caused my companion some amusement. He smiled again. “In its way, it’s a McGuffin. Novak sought that thumb drive; we don’t know why, but we know that whoever hijacked you probably took the information with him — the ‘books’ that your first visitor so politely asked after — so we know Novak is involved in some way or other. It is to our advantage to find out how and why.

“You kindly agreed to be our bait, and our fish took it. Novak believes that he has his information and that you, or rather Rawlins, has been eliminated. When he finds that he has nothing and no one to help him get the drive decrypted, he will rue having destroyed his only means of accessing the files easily. Once he has done something to make himself feel more calm, he will take his next action. That’s what our operatives are waiting for.”

Hunter had taken up his spoon again. I had been eating while he had been talking, and I was loathe to make him miss his turn. I set down my own spoon. “I’m pretty sure this means that I’m going to be laying low for the duration. I’m not sure I know what will happen; the only ‘spy stuff’ I know comes from… sorry, I’ve already said that. Let me give it a try anyway.

“Two possibilities, seems to me: Novak is working for himself or for someone else, or at least there’s someone else involved. In that second case, he’ll have to contact that other someone, and we can track that trail. If he’s on his own, he either has to crack the documents’ passwords or he has to go find the information on his own, and that would mean going to the same place that Rawlins got the information from.” I thought about it. The obvious answer came to mind, and I peered into the dog’s memories to get more information. “Shipping,” I noted. “He keeps records, tracks shipments, cargo containers, all that. There’s nothing in his memories about what he took.”

My companion nodded. “Technically, your hijacker took it; Rawlins’ memory was, most likely, shielded from those actions, if for no other reason than that he wouldn’t be able to divulge any pertinent information.”

“True,” I agreed, “but Rawlins himself had to have had some sort of contact with Novak, or else the dog wouldn’t have known of Novak’s reputation.”

Hunter looked at me with something like approval in his eyes. “You’ve sussed the situation well, Nathaniel. Those are precisely the contingencies we’re covering. In fact…”

Reaching into a pocket, the sable withdrew a device that was probably some sort of cell phone, but with all the tech I’d seen so far, it could have been an all-seeing oracle. He made gestures over it, touched the screen, made me think that he was invoking a spell, then he smiled broadly.

“We seem to have caused Mr. Novak quite a bit of mischief. Some of that overly-polished façade appears to have slipped enough for him to curse Everett for eliminating Rawlins prematurely. Novak is calling in some favors to break into the offices where Rawlins works. Apparently, he doesn’t care how much mess it makes, as long as there’s a reasonable chance that no one finds out about it until Monday or later.”

“Then we can take him down when he goes to get the data, right?”

Hunter’s smile warmed toward me. “We need to find out what data he wants, so we’ll need to let him take it. We can also make sure that he’s not discovered — at least, not yet — so that he can show us the rest of his plan. This will make us fully informed when we go retrieve your body before the hijacker can finish his job at the bank.”

“Will they be able to get into the building?”

“Ask Rawlins.”

Frankly, it disturbed me to realize just how quickly I was getting used to the idea of playing peek-a-boo into the mind of another person. I took a look at the dog’s memories, finding a great many about the workplace and work routine over several years of mundanity. Although anything to do with shipping and dock work takes place every day all day, with no particular observance of holidays, much of the paperwork for Rawlins’ firm went through a central office that took weekends off. Even the security on the place wasn’t that tight; the manifests and billing information was pretty mundane stuff, with numbers representing physical things that no one in the office ever saw.

“Bored security guards, physical locks and alarms that you could probably bypass without much work, and I can only guess what sort of tricks you could do with computers.” I shook my head in disbelief. “Rawlins’ password would be easy to hack, I would guess. I’m reasonably sure that my own password at the bank is better than that. I don’t remember it, but I have enough ‘me’ in here to know what a good password would look like.”

Hunter smiled. His fingers danced across the panel of his phone-or-whatever. “Our operatives will be verifying everything, because that’s what they do; however, this information makes it easy for them to know what to look for, how to see if anything looks out of the ordinary.”

Leaning back against the padded seat of the booth, I surveyed the remains of lunch with a certain satisfaction; I had done more justice to the meal than I’d thought that I could. I also felt a certain tiredness creeping over me, both from mental weariness and the dog’s body having been through more exercise and physical stress than it was used to. “When does the balloon go up?”

The sable grinned at my phrasing. “Technically, there’s no enemy engagement, but the phrase is still useful. Tonight or, more likely, in the small hours of the morning. I’d say in perhaps twelve hours or so.”

“What do we do in the meantime?”

“Most importantly, we find out if Manon is preparing desserts today. Despite her name meaning ‘bitter,’ she is the finest dessert chef I’ve ever known.”

Another unseen signal, and the panther materialized soundlessly at our table. He confirmed Manon’s presence in the kitchen, and Hunter ordered two servings of Crepe Cake. After our fine feline had glided away from us on silent hindpaws, my companion described to me a dish made with fine French crepes layered with fresh whipped cream and topped with a chocolate ganache.

“If you are very good,” Hunter added, “we may be able to convince Manon to let us take with us some of her Blueberry Mascarpone Macarons, if she has them available.”

“What constitutes being good?”

“Not attempting to take any of my own serving of the cake.” He looked at me steadily. “We would not like having to explain to Mr. Rawlins, upon his awakening, how he came to have a wound on his forepaw that had been inflicted by a dessert fork.”

…to be continued