The Academy

by Ridley Pearson

  Steel wrestled free, worked the phone, and declared, “There! Got them both off to DesConte and Reddie.”

  “You suppose they’re here somewhere?” she asked.

  “I suppose,” Steel said, looking around. “Thing is, we’d never know it.”

  Many of the costumes involved masks. Others hid their faces beneath face paint or makeup or fake facial hair.

  “The sooner we change into our costumes, the better,” Kaileigh said. “At least that way he won’t recognize us.”

  “But not until we meet the marks,” Steel said, keeping his voice low. “You need to hear her talk, right?”

  “Duh! I can’t impersonate her without hearing her. I thought that was kind of obvious.”

  “What gave you the wedgie?” he asked. “Chill, dude.”

  “Sorry,” she said. “That guy just bugged me.”

  “That guy works with the lady. He’s the enemy. He’s supposed to bug you. But you’re not supposed—”

  “To show it. I know. To let it get to me. I went through the same training as you, remember? But of course you remember, because you’re you.” She sounded disgusted with him, and he wasn’t sure what he’d done to deserve it.

  “Hey! Hey!” Steel said, under his breath. “Jasmine and Aladdin, two o’clock.”

  She wrenched her head to the right. “Finally,” she said. “Okay, I do this alone. Give me two minutes.”

  “Showtime,” he said.

  She worked with her phone to activate RECORD. She slipped the phone into her shirt pocket but apparently didn’t like the way it sagged, and took it back in hand. Then she headed off toward the two late arrivals, but stopped and turned back to Steel at the last second.

  “The person I thought I saw,” she said. “If you see her, you stay away. There’s no reason for her to be here. It can only mean trouble. Tell me you’ll stay away.”

  “What are you talking about?” he asked. “Who was it?”

  “You’ll know if you see her. Just stay away.”

  His curiosity provoked, Steel raised on tiptoe and began searching the room, looking for a girl—or had Kaileigh seen the woman from the shelter? That made more sense: they would definitely not want her to see them, in case she might remember them from earlier. But why had Kaileigh been so obtuse about it? Why not just tell him? Why was she suddenly playing games with him—and did the kiss have anything to do with her change in attitude?

  His breath caught as a long aisle suddenly opened in the crowd, like the Red Sea parting for Moses. And there at the end of the aisle, in the midst of all the guests, on the far side of the room, appeared a pair of red-and-black running shoes—Wynncliff’s colors—and white ankle socks that, when combined, added up to only one person: Penny. Never mind he wore some Zorro mask and a black cape, and was therefore difficult to recognize. Never mind the bandana tied over his head, hiding his hair, making it all the more difficult to identify him. The shoes gave him away. Steel knew they were Penny’s, and the discovery caused a flood of questions: What was he doing here? How had he gotten an invitation? How had he known about the party? Had he followed Steel and Kaileigh, or was he looking for them? Did Steel dare reveal himself to Penny, or should he hide? How to warn Kaileigh, who, with every step toward Jasmine and Aladdin, was now a step closer to Pennington Cardwell III?

  Kaileigh reached the marks—the boy and girl dressed in Disney outfits—and started talking. Steel was glad to see this part of the operation progressing in spite of his discovery of Penny. He kept his head down and moved back into the tangle of guests to screen himself from Penny; maybe Penny hadn’t spotted him or Kaileigh yet. That might work to my advantage, he thought.

  Kaileigh turned and worked through the crowd to find him. Before he had a chance to speak, she was already talking.

  “We got interrupted. I didn’t get enough time.”

  “Penny’s here,” he said.

  Kaileigh looked stunned. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “It means Penny’s here.”

  “Duh! But why?”

  “No clue.”

  “You think he followed us?”

  “And just happened to have a Zorro costume in his backpack? No, I don’t think so. I don’t know.”

  “So what do we do?” she asked.

  “I think this is what Randolph meant by ‘a fluid situation.’ I think it’s like that: random.”

  “First Nell, then Penny.”

  “Nell!?” Steel barked too loudly.

  “Hush! Yes, that’s who I saw. Nell Campbell. She’s dressed like Hope Solo, and she has an American flag painted on her face, but I’m pretty sure it’s her.”

  “This is getting weirder by the minute. Has to be Randolph, right? His spies.”

  “Penny?”

  “No, not Penny, but Nell for sure. She did everything but tell me she was part of all this.” He thought it through. “Penny…I’ve got a feeling he’s just tagging along thinking he might get invited into our secret society.”

  “Jason—Mr. Hockey Mask—gave us five minutes,” Kaileigh reminded. “Time’s running out. And somehow, a guy like that? I think he meant it.”

  “Of course he did,” Steel said. “He’s here to steal the…you know,” he said, aware of people all around them. “He doesn’t want anyone like me around, who saw him with his mask up, saw his face.”

  “Have you seen DesConte or Reddie?”

  “No, but if Nell and Penny are here, they can’t be far away.”

  “This is a lot more crazy than Randolph said it would be,” she complained.

  “No kidding.”

  “Listen, if I’m going to imitate the girl, impersonate her, I need to hear her talk more. The guy did most of the talking. We need to go back together, and you’ve got to keep the guy busy while I talk to her.”

  “Ah…I’m not exactly the best talker.”

  “Yes you are.”

  “I am?”

  “What’s with you?” she said.

  The kiss, he wanted to answer. One stupid kiss had totally messed him up, and he found himself double-thinking everything she said and did.

  “Okay, so let’s go talk to those two before we lose them,” Steel said. “Then we can change into our costumes and head upstairs, and we’ll be off the big dude’s radar.”

  “Yeah, but think about it,” she said. “He’s here to steal the thumb drive, so he’s watching those two, same as we are.”

  “But there’s no choice,” Steel said. “So we might as well get going before he screws everything up.”

  “I suppose.”

  Together they headed back toward Jasmine and Aladdin. As they drew closer, it was obvious Randolph had chosen them both in part for their height. Kaileigh matched evenly with the girl; Steel was only slightly shorter than the Russian boy.

  Steel introduced himself to the boy and asked if he was from Boston. Kaileigh went to work on the girl, starting up a conversation about how much she loved Disney. The Iranian girl spoke with a thick accent but had a good command of English. She told Kaileigh she’d always wanted to go to Walt Disney World, and then peppered Kaileigh with questions when she found out Kaileigh had been there several times.

  The Russian boy didn’t speak as well. He asked if Steel followed the World Cup, and said he was bugging his father to take him to the competition in South Africa this summer. Steel tried to describe ga-ga, but he failed miserably. The boy evidently thought he was talking about babies.

  Everything seemed to be going fairly well until Steel caught sight of Victor DesConte and Reddie Long—both choirboys, wearing the deep red robes from the chapel, and carrying choir books under their arms. No two boys could look any less like choirboys than these two.

  DesConte moved stiffly, as if in a hurry, drawing Steel’s attention somewhat to the right, where he picked up Jason Voorhees making a beeline toward him and Kaileigh. DesConte had spotted him too, and was running interference, trying to cut off the kid in the hockey mas
k before he reached Steel and rearranged his face for staying overtime.

  “Peter, is that you?” DesConte said, striking Jason in both shoulders like two football players celebrating a touchdown. Steel didn’t actually hear this; he read DesConte’s lips—the movement of the human mouth long since committed to memory—and it was as if he could hear the conversation between the two.

  The blow knocked Jason back a step. “What the…?”

  “North Atlantic hockey tournament?” DesConte said. “We played you guys in the third round.”

  “Wrong guy, choirboy.” Jason Voorhees took a step forward. DesConte tried to block his way. Until that moment, Steel had considered DesConte to be the son of the Incredible Hulk, but the way Jason bumped him aside made him look like a wimp.

  Steel saw Jason coming, and wasn’t sure what to say. A second later, the boy blindsided them. He bumped into the Russian kid, stumbled, and pushed Jasmine into Kaileigh and, as he apologized to both, shot Steel a look that needed no translation: Steel was going to die for overstaying his welcome.

  Kaileigh signaled Steel with her eyes, and the two said their good-byes and moved toward the front, where they’d checked their bags.

  “Did you get enough?” Steel asked.

  Kaileigh looked around to make sure no one was within earshot and, lowering her own voice, spoke in Jasmine’s broken English, then in Farsi. If Steel hadn’t seen the words coming out of Kaileigh’s mouth, he would have sworn she’d tricked him by playing back what she’d captured with the recorder.

  “That is freaky,” he said.

  “You’re hardly one to talk,” she said.

  “So we’re a pair of freaks.”

  She grinned at him. He liked that. Truth be told, right now he liked everything about her.

  Now filled to capacity, the party had escalated from a hum to a buzz. Taddler returned to the punch bowl, where Johnny continued to eat his way through everything the caterers put out. Johnny’s lack of focus bothered Taddler; he seemed more interested in girls and food than the assignment.

  Taddler grabbed his cape from behind and dragged him away from the food table.

  “Hey! What the—”

  “You’re off-mission, dude,” he whispered through his hockey mask.

  “No I’m not, I’m…scouting. So…are we outta here?”

  “No. They didn’t have it on them.”

  “But I thought—”

  “So did I,” Taddler said, “but Mrs. D. was wrong, or the pass hasn’t happened yet. I frisked them both. Nothing. So stop stuffing your face and keep your eyes on the two of them, because that’s your job.”

  “Who put you in charge?”

  “You have other ideas?”

  “I’m just saying…” But Johnny got a look through the hockey mask at the beady eyes, and he cut himself off. “We’re cool,” he said.

  “We are so not cool,” Taddler said. “We’re going to have to follow them, and I’m going to have to bump them again, and that makes twice, which means they’re going to be suspicious. So once it goes down, we’re going to have to move fast. Mrs. D. wanted us out the front door, but now it’s probably going to be the staircase drop.”

  “We practiced that. I’m cool with it.”

  “Stop saying that, would you? You are not cool with anything. It’s tricky dropping that thing, and you gotta be there to catch it, and if we screw up and it bounces off the railing or something, then one of us has to go find it, and that’s probably going to be you.”

  “Okay.”

  “We’ve got to know where everybody is, ’specially any security guys, and that’s your job, and I don’t see you doing it.”

  “Lose the rash, dude. We’re fine.”

  “I’m going upstairs now.”

  “I know…I know…”

  “I’ve got the phone.” Taddler was proud that they’d been given the phones, and was hoping to actually use them.

  “I’ve got mine too.” Johnny patted his pocket. But then, finally doing his job, he took a look around the big room, his eyes quickly lighting upon a familiar woman near the entrance, wearing a Buffy the Vampire Slayer costume. She wore a headband that held back her long hair, and she was talking to a tough guy in an old suit, who Johnny knew, absolutely knew, had to be a cop. She was pointing at him and Taddler.

  “Dude, you’d…better…get…going.” He hadn’t meant for his voice to quaver, but there was no taking it back now.

  Taddler followed Johnny’s paralyzed stare, and recognized the woman from the giant tarot card on the outside of her store.

  “The fortune-teller,” he said.

  Johnny’s astonishment that Taddler could possibly know the woman registered as a wide-eyed gawk. “Dude?”

  “I saw you,” Taddler explained. “Tell me you didn’t tell her about this job.”

  “I wanted to know if I was going to be one of the two picked by Mrs. D.”

  “You told her?”

  “Only that I had a job to do and that it was kinda dangerous and—” But as Johnny heard his own words he realized how lame he’d been. “Oh, man…I didn’t mean to.”

  “That’s a cop she’s with.”

  “Oh, man,” Johnny moaned.

  “You screwed us. You…totally screwed us!”

  “You get gone,” Johnny said. “I can lose the cop.”

  “I need someone to catch the thing when I drop it. I need you.”

  “I’m cool,” he said. “Seriously, I’ll be there.”

  “You are so not cool. If you cost me this chance, Johnny, you’d better not ever show your face at the boathouse again.”

  “I can do this,” Johnny insisted.

  “You’d better.”

  By the time the elevator stopped on the fourteenth floor and the doors slid open, revealing the hallway, with its dark wood paneling, a lead cut mirror in a gilded frame looming above an antique side table that held a giant bouquet of fresh flowers, Steel’s throat felt choked, and he found himself unable to speak. Although he’d practiced wearing the pigmented contact lenses, his eyes stung. The makeup he’d used to look more like Aladdin (and less like himself) made his face feel puckered. To make matters worse, he wore a gold turban, a vest over a baggy shirt, and puffy-legged pants, with faux-leather pointy-toed slippers that were supposed to look like genie shoes. But it wasn’t the costume he found suffocating, it was their situation.

  The hallway looked about a mile long. Halfway between the elevators and an exit at the far end stood two men in black suits, their backs to the wall on either side of a hotel room door. With each step, Steel and Kaileigh grew farther from the safety of the elevators and closer to the danger of the men, for, according to Randolph, these two were professional bodyguards whose job it was to keep the ambassador and his family safe. The ambassador’s family included his daughter, and Kaileigh was now going to try to impersonate her—someone these two men probably knew well. The more Steel thought about it, the more foolish it seemed. Maybe he and Kaileigh were nothing but sacrificial lambs; maybe Randolph had other plans.

  The problem, if there was one, wouldn’t be a matter of disguise. Like the Iranian girl downstairs, Kaileigh wore a piece of brown silk pulled across to hide her face—with only her brown contact lenses showing. She wore a Jasmine wig, a Jasmine blouse, and Jasmine pants that puffed out like Steel’s. At first glance, there was no telling the two apart.

  Together, he thought, he and Kaileigh looked ridiculous, a situation that might play in their favor: it would be hard for the bodyguards to take them seriously. Maybe they wouldn’t look very closely.

  Kaileigh played it cool, offering a slight wave to the bodyguards. She kept her head down—her face covered by the gauze—as she rattled off something in Farsi, pointing to Steel’s Aladdin. She’d introduced him. The two men smiled and nodded. Kaileigh and Steel stood there in front of the door. No one moved. It seemed to last a minute. Then one of the guards said something, and Kaileigh’s dark contact lenses flashed
at Steel as she began patting her costume.

  The key. The guard had politely told her to use her card—a room key she didn’t possess.

  She said something back to him, throwing up her arms.

  The guard nodded, reached into his pocket, and unlocked the door for them. He said something to Kaileigh as they entered, and she said something back, and the guard pulled the door closed. It clicked shut.

  She called out “Hello?” in Farsi and waited for an answer.

  Four doors led off the living room: a small bathroom and presumably three bedrooms. Randolph’s intel had been good: they were alone in a luxurious living room with a gorgeous view of the city lights. A grand piano stood in the corner, accompanied by twin sofas, four comfortable-looking chairs, and enough potted plants to make a small jungle.

  A giant flat-panel television on the far wall ran CNN. It sounded like another television was playing nearby.

  “The safe!” Steel whispered, knowing there would be one in each of the hotel bedroom closets. They split up, Steel taking one of the bedrooms to the right, Kaileigh to the left.

  “Over here,” she called out only seconds later. She’d located a bedroom with a king-size bed and a man’s dark suits hanging in the closet—the ambassador’s bedroom. She pointed out the safe below a stack of folded shirts.

  Steel had memorized birth dates, phone numbers, the numbers from national identification cards, and even driver’s licenses for the ambassador and all his family. The safe used a four-digit combination, and Randolph had advised Steel to start with the month and date of family birthdays and eventually graduate to four-digit groupings of the ambassador’s Iranian identification card.

  He entered a variety of different combinations. The safe continued to beep at him, displaying: IMPROPER CODE…PLEASE TRY AGAIN.

  The flat-panel TV was tuned to a financial channel. The woman on the show was throwing out a series of numbers, confusing Steel.

  “Mute that thing, would you?” Steel asked. Kaileigh found the wand and silenced the television.

  The bedside phone rang, along with every phone in the suite. They stared at it, but did not answer. Steel turned back to the safe.