Kris Longknife's Bloodhound, a novella by Mike Shepherd

after him, now are we?” Taylor said, posing the question.  “He had to be bringing in a skipper for that tender.”
    “Two people,” Leslie said, slowly.
    “Should we search for recent Navy destroyer captains now on the beach?” Rick asked.
    “It would not do us any good,” Mahomet pointed out, “If Kittikon is in full disguise, so would he or she be?”
    “So we hunt for two men.  Or a man and a woman.  No, two people?” Leslie said. 
    Taylor smiled as his protégé caught on.  “And we follow them out until they go into a rest room and come out different.”
    “This is going to take a lot of computer power,” Leslie said.
    “I’ll go talk to the boss.”
    The boss did her best, but Taylor did better.  He used his new found in with a senior member of parliament to get access to the Ministry of Defense’s spare computers as well. 
    Still, it took a whole lot more time than they had.
    A week later, Leslie bounced out of her chair and began doing a rather cute victory dance.  “Yes!  Yes!  I have her!”
    “Her?  I thought we were after a him?” Rick asked.
    “Yes, but he’s a her at the moment.”
    “Explain,” Taylor said.
    “Here we have two well-dressed matrons entering a lady’s room at a shopping emporium about a mile from Longknife Tower.  They never leave that room, not for the six hours until closing.  No exit.”
    The team was gathering around to watch the action on the wall screen.  Even the boss seemed to have been called in.
    “However, here we have two rather attractive young women leaving the facility, some fifteen minutes later.  They never entered it.  The computer spotted this discrepancy.  I had it check all the way back and forward through the day, then follow the matrons back to the tower, or as close as we could get to it before the cameras puked out on us.  They were in a taxi.  One of the better ones.  They left here in a town car.  Again, one of the better ones.”
    “Is that Kittikon?” the boss asked.
    “Allowing for the minor discrepancy in gender, the computer gives us a 39.58% chance it’s Kittikon.  That’s too low for us to normally get a hit on the search routine, but I lowered the threshold.  The other ‘woman’ is as much a mystery.  She doesn’t cause a hit in any of our searches.  However, when I lowered the probability to 35%, I got 56 potential hits.  What’s interesting is that one of them is a former destroyer skipper.”
    “Former?” the boss asked.
    “Commander Megan Zloben was relieved of her command by her superior for the rather general reason of ‘loss of confidence.’  What does that mean, boss?”
    Taylor made a face.  “It means her superior no longer had confidence in her ability to command the ship.”
    “That sounds rather vague,” Leslie said.  “And not all that fair.”
    “I have the file here,” Rick said.  “It says she failed to properly mentor her subordinates.”
    “Gosh, boss,” Leslie said, eyes way too wide, “are you getting credit for making us a great team?”
    “Something like that,” his boss said.  “It appears that this commander knows how to drive a ship, but not how to build a crew.”

“And she’s on the beach,” Taylor said.
    “And a certain Alex Longknife is more interested in her driving a ship whether or not she drives her crew to drink.”
    “He’s likely paying top dollar,” Mahomet pointed out.  “They can put up with a bit of  Captain Bligh.”
    “So, where is she?” Taylor’s boss asked.
    “The computer is tracking the two of them.  Their town car passed through several areas not under surveillance.  When we next see it, it’s taking on a new fare,” Leslie reported.  “I’ve got it working, ma’am.”
    “You keep it working.  Taylor, you go home.  This was supposed to be your vacation time, remember?”
    “My wife won’t let me forget.”
    It was two days later that they finally tracked them to a small villa down the