Crossing the Line

by Meghan Rogers

  I saw Scorpion moving toward me. I took a swing at the bag, but he caught my wrist before I could land the punch, putting himself in between me and Nikki.

  “What are you doing?” I asked, annoyed.

  He let go of my arm and stood with his arms crossed.

  “Travis, what the hell?” Nikki stepped next to him, glaring.

  “Not now.” He didn’t even look at her. Nikki wasn’t one to let these guys talk to her like that, so there must have been something about his tone that kept her quiet. He gave me a once-over, scrutinizing every inch of me. “What are you up to?”

  Now I was confused. “What are you talking about?”

  “I’m talking about how you acted in Hong Kong. You made sure nothing happened to me.” His eyes constricted like he was trying to read my mind. “After what I did to you, you got me out. That’s not normal.”

  “I told you: You were my mission.” I tried to blow him off, but he wasn’t having it.

  “Bull. It would have been so easy to kill me and make it look like an accident.” He shook his head. “I couldn’t even see. You could have gotten away with it.”

  “So you think because I did what I was supposed to, it means I’m up to something?” I couldn’t win. I didn’t expect him to trust me, but I had thought I’d at least earned some room to breathe. Instead he was trying to suffocate me.

  “I think you’ve got a much longer play in mind.” He took a step closer. “I’ll find out what it is. This isn’t a fight in the field. You’re in my house, and I will catch you.”

  I clenched my jaw. “There is no play.”

  He stared down at me, getting angrier by the second. Then in one quick movement, he stepped back and punched the bag hard, right at me. I just barely dodged it, falling to the floor to save it from hitting my still-sore side. I stayed down and watched him stalk out of the room. Once he was gone, a hand appeared in front of my face. It was Nikki’s. She waited patiently for me to reach up and then pulled me to my feet.

  Once I was standing, she gave me a hard, searching look and fixed me with an expression I couldn’t read. “Just so you know, I don’t think he’s right.”

  “You’re the only one.”

  Nikki shrugged. “I might be. But you really made a statement bringing him back. I don’t know what happened in Hong Kong, but Travis stopped just short of saying you saved his life. And if that’s true, after everything he’s done to you—” She broke off and stared at the path Scorpion had taken out of the gym. “Then you must really want to be here.”

  “I do.” I kept my voice even, afraid to read too much into what she was saying.

  She nodded once. “That’s what I thought. Though I have to say, he might give you a little more of a shot if he knew what your secret research project was and what it meant to you.”

  I shook my head hard enough for my side ponytail to swing. “Absolutely not.”

  “Okay,” she said, stepping back behind the bag. “If that’s how you want it. But know I’m on your side.” I should have known better than to allow the small bubble of hope to grow in my chest. But I didn’t have it in me to pop it.

  Chapter Thirteen

  NOT-SO-SECRET AGENT

  Three days had passed since Scorpion’s return and he hadn’t spoken to me since. But he was watching me. Most active agents lived off campus, so even though the gym is open on weekends, it was pretty much used by only the academy kids and me. Scorpion had been there every day that weekend. He kept to himself, doing some form of cardio or another, and he made sure he was facing me at all times. I kept myself focused on my workouts. I couldn’t do too much else while I waited for word on the drive, and I had to make up for whatever the Gerex had done. I was starting to feel a little bit stronger, and I hadn’t felt short of breath since I’d been back, so I considered it an improvement.

  Simmonds finally called me into his office early Monday, about a week after the China mission. I knew it had to be about the drive.

  “There are a few layers to this,” he said once I had seated myself across from him. “We know all of the intel that came back is about KATO, but the Chinese had put their own decryption on the drive. It took our tech team some time, but they were able to remove it.”

  I nodded eagerly, trying to keep my impatience at bay. “What did they find?”

  “There are two smaller files and one larger folder,” Simmonds said. “One file was accessible, while the other is also encrypted, but in a very different way. We think this is KATO’s encryption that the Chinese weren’t able to crack yet. The folder has a similar encryption, but it’s significantly more complicated. Both of those will take time.”

  “Okay,” I said, shifting to the edge of my seat. “What about the file you could access?”

  Simmonds gave me a small smile. “I was hoping you could help us with that.” He slid a piece of paper in front of me. “According to our translators, it doesn’t make even a little bit of sense. It’s my best guess that it’s coded. I’m sure the Chinese were working on cracking it at the time.”

  I studied the single line of Korean characters on the paper. “It’s more than a simple code. It’s a cipher. But I don’t think it’s one of the more complex ones.” I looked up at him. “At least, not if you know what you’re looking for. The Chinese probably didn’t even know where to start, though.”

  “How much time do you need?”

  “Give me a few hours with it,” I said. “There are a few different possibilities I want to run though. I’ll check back with you when I have something.”

  • • •

  I skipped the morning training session and went back to my room to work on the code instead. A couple hours and several cipher keys later, I had cracked it. It was a date, a time, and coordinates. I had the information to Simmonds before lunch. The date was a little more than a week away, and from what he could tell, the coordinates lined up with a warehouse in Iran. It didn’t say what KATO had planned, but he said that was his job to find out. In the meantime, he’d given me some more information to pass on to KATO, hoping that the more I talked to them, the more windows the IDA would have into their system and the better chance we’d have at piecing this all together.

  I could feel Scorpion’s eyes on me at lunch that day. I sat by myself a few tables away from him, stirring a bowl of soup. I was sure missing the morning training session had ignited a new suspicion in him. He was sitting with Cody and a few agents I didn’t know, but it seemed even they couldn’t take his attention from me. I still had to make my next contact with KATO and had hoped to avoid ducking out between classes again. I didn’t want any of the students or teachers noticing a pattern. But the way Scorpion was watching me, I knew there was no way I’d be able to pull it off outside of that time.

  A hand waved in front of my face. “Hello? Anybody in there?”

  I blinked back to reality and realized Nikki was sitting in front of me. She had her own plate of food and was looking at me with a curious and concerned expression.

  “What?” I asked.

  “You find anything new about your parents?” she asked.

  “No.” I hated that I hadn’t been able to give the search much time with everything else going on. I glanced over her shoulder, past the tables full of chattering students and agents, at Scorpion, who scrutinized me with an unreadable expression on his face. “I can’t get much done without the hawk hovering.”

  She turned around and saw who I had been looking at. “I see the ice hasn’t thawed between the two of you.”

  I shrugged. “I get why he doesn’t trust me. I just don’t know how rescuing him made him more suspicious.”

  I glanced over at Nikki, who looked bewildered that I had said anything. I hadn’t meant to. But after last week I found myself genuinely wanting to trust her. She took a moment to recover, then spoke softly enough that no one around cou
ld hear us. “You scare him, Jocelyn.”

  My eyebrows arched, stunned.

  She continued. “Hong Kong is one of the few times when he’s truly gotten beat. He’s had things not work out, but he doesn’t get beat like that. Unless he’s facing you.” She sighed. “Hong Kong was a combination of bad luck and bad intel. It was bound to happen to him eventually. But you’ve taken him out consistently, and you’ve found more of his weaknesses than anyone else. And now you’re here. Every day. And you’ve seen him in a more vulnerable state than any of us have. He doesn’t like you around him or his friends. He’s afraid he can’t protect us. And he hates that I’m talking to you.”

  I looked back over at him. Now he was laughing at something Cody had said. But it wasn’t a real laugh. It fell short of his eyes. A part of me liked that I scared him. It meant he was as uncomfortable as I was. “So when I got him out of Hong Kong—”

  “You confused him,” she said. “As far as he’s concerned, there’s no way you could be on our side, which means if you saved him there’s a bigger reason for it. And the fact that you saw him so defenseless only added to his concern.”

  I nodded slowly, taking a moment to digest her words. “How do you know this much about him?”

  Nikki shrugged. “He’s a year older than me, so we spent some time at the academy together. And we were partners for a while after I graduated two years ago.”

  “So, you’re not partners anymore?”

  She shook her head. “We didn’t really click. But it was enough for me to join his training group, which was not easy to break into.”

  “What made it so hard?” I asked.

  She leaned a little closer. “Cody and Rachel were seniors when Travis was a freshman, and when they saw he needed a challenge they went out of their way to help him. At the time, they were some of the IDA’s top prospects, which made the three of them together a little bit legendary. They kept working out together even after Cody and Rachel became agents. It was just the three of them until I graduated. I’ve gotten to know all of them pretty well over the last two years.”

  I fidgeted uncomfortably. I didn’t know what it meant to get to know someone. In fact, I went out of my way not to get to know the other KATO agents, in case I ever had to kill one.

  “Anyway,” Nikki said, “you should probably get to class. I’ll meet you after. I’ve got everything we need to decorate your room. That should chase the hawk way for a little while, okay?”

  “Yeah.” I nodded. “Thanks.”

  • • •

  I had to run out of Agent Lee’s room to get my message to KATO before my next class. I was a little more practiced with getting into the system by now. I had started typing KATO’s spoof proxy before I even sat down and a minute later I was on the board where I needed to be. Simmonds had given me some twisted and skewed details about what I’d been learning at the academy, and I was careful to replicate the wording and punctuation from the file exactly.

  I heard a small click of the door opening behind me and hit the post button as fast as I could. I couldn’t close out of anything else, because the next thing I knew I was pulled out of my chair and hurled to the floor.

  “I knew it!” Scorpion stood over me, so angry the vein popped out of his neck. “I fucking knew it!”

  “It’s not what you’re thinking,” I said, struggling to get to the computer. He pushed my shoulder into the ground with his foot. Any harder and he might have dislocated it. I clenched my teeth together, frustrated at how slow I had become without that stupid drug, slow enough to have landed myself in this situation.

  He leaned over the computer. “The hell it’s not!” He read my post. “You sent them a message! What the fuck were you telling them?” I kept my jaw clenched shut, which seemed to only make him even angrier. He stooped down and pulled me up by my collar, then slammed me into the leg of the table. “Tell me. Now!”

  Still I said nothing.

  “I could kill you right now, and no one would have a problem with it.” There was an uplifting note in his tone.

  “Simmonds would,” I said with enough conviction to make him pause.

  “You really think so.” He sat back on his heels, then nodded. “Yeah, let’s go see him. When this is all over, I don’t want anyone having to question that I did the right thing.” He stood up, towering over me. “And Simmonds should know how you played him.”

  He grabbed my wrists and twisted my hands behind my back. Then he pulled me to my feet so quickly I stumbled trying to walk. He dragged me along after him with so much force I swore he wanted me to fight him. But I wouldn’t. I couldn’t afford to cause a scene. I still had a lot of work to do here, and I would never get the chance if I started attacking agents in the center of campus. I could still save this mission, I just couldn’t make things any worse.

  Fortunately, there weren’t too many people out and about at this time of day. All the kids were in classes and the other agents were scattered, spending their free time on or off campus as they wanted. I did my best to keep up with Scorpion as he pulled me across the courtyard, hoping if anyone did see us the weirdest thing would be that the two of us were together.

  Scorpion didn’t even bother to knock when we got to Simmonds’s door. He shoved the door open and threw me in. Simmonds wasn’t alone. Two other agents—one male and one female—sat in the chairs across from him. The three of them seemed to have been in a deep discussion before we interrupted. I didn’t recognize either of the agents, but they appeared to be in their midtwenties.

  Simmonds’s eyes widened as he took us in, and I shot him an apologetic look. He glanced at the agents across from him. “I’m going to need a minute with them.”

  The agents agreed easily, but gave both of us curious and questioning looks as they stepped outside.

  Simmonds looked between the two of us once the door had closed. “What’s going on?”

  I put myself on the other side of the room, as far away from Scorpion as I could get. I shook my head at Simmonds. I didn’t want to commit to a story until I heard what Scorpion had already worked out. He took the bait.

  “I caught KATO’s Viper”—he spit the word out of his mouth and glared at me—“sending a message back to her agency.”

  Simmonds’s expression didn’t change. “I see,” he said, then turned to me. “Was it what we discussed?”

  “Yes, sir,” I said. “But I only had time to post it. I didn’t get to log out of anything.”

  “Then let’s handle that first, shall we?” He turned to the laptop on his desk. “What computer were you on?”

  “C-six in the Academy Building.” I slid my hand under my ponytail, rubbing my burn nervously as Simmonds remotely logged me out of the computer I had been using. Then I risked a glance at Scorpion.

  He was looking from me to Simmonds with a stunned look on his face. And I swear the vein in his neck got bigger. “Someone better tell me what is going on.” His voice was a quiet anger. He was beyond yelling.

  Simmonds fixed me with a disappointed look. We had to tell him something, which neither of us wanted. And it was all my fault.

  “I’m sorry, sir,” I said, then shrugged halfheartedly. “I guess this is me asking for help.” I felt Scorpion’s eyes on me.

  Simmonds grimaced, but I could tell I had him there. He sighed and leaned his elbow on his desk. I kept my mouth shut, gripping the back of one of the chairs to stay calm.

  “You were right,” Simmonds said to Scorpion. “Jocelyn was sent here to be a double agent. She told me so the first time we spoke.”

  “She told you?” Scorpion’s forehead wrinkled in confusion and he sunk down into the other chair.

  Simmonds nodded. “Everything I said when she first got here was true. Her parents did work for this agency and she was kidnapped as a child to get back at all of us. The North Koreans took great satisfac
tion in raising one of our own against us.”

  Scorpion straightened and tensed. “If she’s against us, then why—”

  “She isn’t against us.” Simmonds’s voice was calm enough to keep Scorpion in his seat and to keep me being swallowed by my own disappointment. “She confessed her mission the second she got here and KATO has no idea. She’s been feeding them exactly what we want them to know.”

  “So—” I could practically see the wheels turning in Scorpion’s head. “So, what she was sending today—”

  “Was discussed and agreed upon by myself and the board of directors.”

  Scorpion slouched back in the chair, still in a state of disbelief. “Then why keep it a secret?” he asked. “Why not just tell us all what’s going on?”

  I surprised myself by answering. “Because we can’t risk KATO finding out.” Scorpion’s eyes locked on me, like he had forgotten I was in the room. “They have spies everywhere. There’s something bigger in play, so I still have to act the part. All of you needed to be suspicious of me at first.”

  Scorpion ran his hands through his hair. “But how do we know any of this is true?” He looked at Simmonds. “How do you know this isn’t just some story she’s feeding you?”

  I shot Simmonds a pleading look, begging him not to give away any more.

  “It’s my job to know,” Simmonds said, not so much as glancing in my direction.

  Scorpion shook his head. “No offense, sir, but when it comes to her I don’t take anything for granted.”

  Simmonds leaned closer to him. “Agent Elton, I think you know by now what my word is worth.” They were talking about something else now, and I didn’t completely understand what.

  Based on Scorpion’s expression, it looked like the weight of Simmonds’s words hit him. “Of course I know.”

  “She’s proven herself to me,” Simmonds said. “If you respect me, you’ll respect that.”

  Scorpion shook his head, like he couldn’t wrap his mind around any part of this conversation. His eyes came to rest on me, taking me in. And for the first time, his face wasn’t filled with the pure hatred I was accustomed to. It looked more like Nikki’s had the first time she came over to me in the gym. He rubbed the back of his neck, still in a state of slight disbelief. “All right, sir. I hear you.”