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Odelia studied her grandmother, who was now exchanging pleasantries with Putin. If she was happy, and Mom and Dad were happy, what harm could it do? Probably none. Besides, she had other issues to tackle. Like what to do about Diego. And what to do about this Dieber business. Chase might be happy with the way the case had concluded, but she wasn’t. Something wasn’t right, and she couldn’t walk away until she figured out what.

Chapter 24

Watching Tex and Alec at work proved a great soporific. Very soon my eyes closed, and after a while I was sound asleep, perched on the hot stone floor of the deck. I only woke up when something prodded my ribcage, and I made a valiant attempt to slap them away.

“Lemme… sleep,” I muttered.

“Max!” a voice intruded on my peaceful slumber. “She’s gone!”

“That’s great,” I said, smacking my lips and turning over to my other side. I wasn’t done sleeping. Not by a mile.

“Max!” the voice insisted, and finally I opened my eyes to see who this horrible disturber of the peace could be. I was about to give him a piece of my mind when I found myself staring into Brutus’s green eyes. Once upon a time those green eyes had haunted my nightmares, but that was before Diego had come to town, and our enmity had turned into an unexpected alliance over shared grievances. The enemy of an enemy is a friend and all that.

“Brutus?” I asked, instantly awake. It’s one of my finer qualities. Us cats can be asleep one second and wide awake the next. And we don’t even need liters of caffeine to accomplish this amazing feat. “What’s wrong, buddy?”

“Harriet’s gone, Max. Said she couldn’t live without him.”

“Without who?”

I should probably have said‘whom’ but I didn’t think Brutus would care.

“Diego, of course! She was pining for him and whining about him and finally she left.”

“Where did she go?”

“Dieber’s place, of course! Where Diego was last seen.” He placed a pleading claw on my front leg. “We have to go after her. She’s going to get herself in all kinds of trouble. That place is like the Bermuda Triangle for cats! Enter Dieber Castle and never be seen again!”

“No, it’s not. Dieber collects cats and then he gives them away to deserving Bediebers. Odelia told me all about it. To the Dieber cats are like swag. He puts them in gift bags and hands them out like so many pieces of candy or keychains or beauty products.”

“That’s… sick, Max.”

“Yeah, it’s not very cat-friendly,” I agreed.

Brutus’s eyes had gone wide. “He’s going to give Harriet away! To who-knows-who!”

“He can’t. She’s not his to give away,” I pointed out. Deep down, though, I knew he was right. The moment the Dieber laid his hands on a pretty Persian like Harriet, he would probably give her away to his biggest fan, which might mean she could very well end up in war-torn Afghanistan, Somalia or Syria. The kid had fans all across the globe. And even though Harriet and I rarely saw eye to eye, I would hate for her to meet such a terrible fate.

I gave Dooley, who was snoring softly next to me, a prod in the ribs. He woke up with a start and a snuffle.“Who’s your daddy now?” he mumbled, promptly opening his eyes.

“I don’t want to know,” I told him. “Harriet’s gone, and if we don’t get her back she’ll be on a plane to Kabul, Mogadishu or possibly even Damascus before we know it.”

He blinked a few times.“Kabul? What’s a Kabul, Max?”

“It’s a city, Dooley, and not one Harriet will enjoy. It’s hot there, and not so safe.”

“She’s gone back to Dieber’s place,” Brutus explained urgently. “And we all know what happens to cats once they enter that compound. They vanish! Without a trace!”

“Oh, no,” said Dooley, fully on board now, his brain firing on all cylinders—which was just the one, in his case, but he definitely made it count. “Max, we have to save her!”

Dooley, who was president of the Harriet Fan Club long before Brutus had entered the picture, seemed even more anxious than his rival in love.

“The problem is that she went there of her own volition,” I said. “Which makes it hard to organize an extraction.” I’d seen plenty of action movies where SEAL Team Six goes in to save some hapless civilian, only to discover that said civilian has sold our heroes down the river, to be faced with the drug kingpin’s wrath until all that’s left is SEAL Team Zero.

Dooley stared at me, wide-eyed.“You mean…”

“I mean that Harriet could very well sell us to the Dieber, and before we know it we’ll be the ones stuck in Kabul, Mogadishu, Damascus or possibly even Kinshasa, Congo.”

“I don’t want to go to Congo, Max,” Dooley intimated. “I’ll bet they don’t even have Cat Snax there.”

“Who cares about Cat Snax?!” Brutus thundered. He’d been following the discussion with rising impatience. “We go in. We snatch Harriet. We get out. It’s as simple as that.”

“And what if she doesn’t want to be snatched?” I asked. “We can’t very well force her to leave with us, Brutus.”