I’m thrown off my guard for a few seconds. By the time I regain it, the damage is done. They’ve taken my photo and are already running away toward the dorms, their laughter sounding conspiratorial. They might as well have hurled a ninja star at my heart.
CHAPTER 2
By morning, I’ve put the camera incident into better perspective. It was weird and random, but equating a bunch of freshmen taking my photo to a ninja-star attack was a total overreaction. Bunker said it only confirmed his point about me looking like a member of a boy band, suggesting they just wanted a photo of me with my shirt off. He also was convinced the girls had put me and my cover in grave danger, though I had neither confirmed nor denied the fact that I even have a cover.
The thing is, Bunker is mostly right. I technically do still work for the Company, also known as the CIA. Rogers’s high-school recruitment program, Operation Early Bird, will likely be shut down, but I was able to talk her out of completely firing me and agreed to an indefinite suspension. I also convinced her to get me enrolled at Carlisle Academy. I told her I chose Carlisle and its stellar STEM programs for my senior year because it was always a dream of mine to attend. I also pointed out that, given the student body, I could amass quality intel on some of the nation’s top science research laboratories and the scientists working inside them. The Company is never supposed to spy on the homeland, and technically I’m off the job, so it was a hard offer to refuse.
Rogers wrote in the Ukraine final incident report that I was good at what I did, but tended to get a little too “emotionally invested.” Until Rogers recruited me, I hadn’t been emotionally invested in anything. I was only hacking because I could, because no one could stop me, because it was all I had of my own. This job gave me a reason to … I don’t know, just a reason, period. So hell yeah, I get worked up about it sometimes. Rogers doesn’t see it that way, but I’ll prove her wrong when my skills and my passion for my job help me capture the most dangerous member of Marchuk’s team. Pavlo may be dead, but I’ve been watching his hacker-for-hire since we left Ukraine. Over the summer, I caught him monitoring our defense command center down in Colorado Springs, as well as some of our country’s top research labs right here in town, and in my book that makes him a threat to national security. Which is why I’ve tracked him to Carlisle.
Even before Rogers gave me the job, I always kept a low profile because of being, well, a criminal. I was never a fan of selfies or social media, so it wasn’t hard to stay low. But once I started hacking for the right side of the law and became an operative, the Company searched for and removed every trace of me or my face from the internet. What they say about the internet being forever? It’s true unless the CIA eradicates the old you and creates the fake you.
So while I got zero sleep thinking about the girl with the camera, remembering my bigger mission has kept me from freaking out. At least until Bunker found me at my locker this morning.
“Bro, how’re you holding up?” he asks me. “I’m guessing not well, since you sneaked out of the house so early this morning.”
Bunker’s just worried about me, but I can’t deal with an interrogation this morning, so I fake being chill about the whole thing.
“I didn’t sneak … I just wanted to get my mind right for the calculus exam today and used the walk to think,” I say, banging on my stuck locker door until it finally unsticks and flies open. “Wouldn’t happen to have any WD-40 on you, would you?”
But Bunker will not be distracted.
“You had the Morrisons worried, but I covered for you,” Bunker says, referring to our host family. He was assigned to them because he’s attending Carlisle on a scholarship that doesn’t include the outrageous boarding fees. I live there because spies who are suspended, and gathering intel that is only potentially useful, rate the lowest expense budgets possible. “Mrs. Morrison made me bring you this.”
He hands me a brown paper bag. I open it to find a partially eaten blueberry muffin, half a banana, and a string cheese wrapper, and give it back along with some serious side-eye.
“I got hungry on the drive to school,” he says, looking guilty as he stuffs it into his Phantom Menace backpack, a relic from his dad’s bunker. I tried to tell him no one beyond middle school carries a Star Wars backpack, and certainly not one from a movie two decades old, but Bunker doesn’t care about that kind of thing. He likes what he likes, including my food, apparently.
Just thinking about that muffin makes my stomach growl, but missing breakfast was worth avoiding another interrogation from Bunker. Of course, he’d have tried to mask his questions, but Bunk isn’t exactly a whiz at subterfuge. It’s hard to learn the nuances of interpersonal deception—also known as lying—when you spend your whole life with only one person, sharing a three-hundred-square-foot space. Pretty hard to hide anything in that situation.
“Look, we’ve only known each other a short time, but we’re already like brothers from another mother. Except for you actually being a brother. Wait—since I’m not black, is it okay for me to call you that?” Bunker asks, but doesn’t wait for an answer. “What I’m saying is, you can confide in me. Come on, aren’t you just a little worried about … the incident?”
I consider pretending I have no idea what he’s talking about, but I know evasion won’t work with Bunker. He’ll only pester me until I concede or punch him in the face. I like Bunk; in fact, he’s my only friend at Carlisle, even if we aren’t quite at the ‘brother’ level yet. That’s something Rogers would consider further evidence of my emotional attachment issues. An operative should never have actual friends, only assets.
Still, I’d rather avoid punching Bunker in the face, so I try a confusion tactic instead.
“I’ll admit I had a hard time getting to sleep last night. Depending on how those freshmen frame the whole thing, if she ever saw that photo, Darlene would make my life hell.”
“Darlene?”
“My girlfriend, you know, back home in Texas? I told you about her.”
“No, sir, you did not. First time I have ever heard of this Darlene person,” Bunker says, sounding skeptical. I don’t dare look at his face to get a read. Not that I need to. It’s clear from his voice he doesn’t believe me. “How is it possible that we’ve shared a home for eight weeks and I have never heard a single mention of a girlfriend ‘back home’?”
“Because when I left, things weren’t so great between us. She was angry I’d chosen Carlisle over her. I wasn’t sure there was anything to tell,” I explain, feigning interest in something buried deep inside my locker. “But we’ve been talking and, you know, working it out with the long-distance thing. So yeah, I’m a little worried about what they might do with the picture.”
I peek around my locker door and manage an expression of worry that must convince Bunker, because he seems to buy the story.
“And what about her?” Bunker says in a low voice. “Is you-know-who aware of Darlene?”
He nods to someone across the hall, but I don’t turn around to see who’s there.
I already know.
“She wouldn’t care,” I say, crushed as I am to admit it.
“I get it,” Bunker says, nodding knowingly. “You haven’t told her.”
“There’s nothing between us, so there’s no reason to tell,” I say, hoping Bunker senses I might actually punch him in the face.
“Uh huh, that’s why you couldn’t stop talking about her after you guys went out that one time. Didn’t sound like ‘nothing’ to me.”
“Like you said, it was a one-time thing, okay? Moving on.” This time, my tone should make it clear even to Bunker that the Q&A session is over.
He stares at me for a second, and while I’m a good actor—nature of the job and all—I get the feeling Bunker hasn’t believed a word I’ve said since he walked up. I see in his expression that he’s forming another question, but he must think better of it.
“You probably haven’t been online this morning, given your aversion to t
he internet,” Bunker says, and then it’s like I can see the cartoon light bulb go on over his head. “Which could point to you actually being Peter Smith, mild-mannered prep-school student, because a you-know-what would be on the dark web infiltrating sleeper cells and black-hat networks—”
“I think you mean the deep web—not the same thing.”
“—on the other hand, your aversion to social media is the appropriate response of someone flying under the radar,” Bunker says, ignoring my correction. “Anyway, I already know how those girls will frame it.”
I get this sinking feeling, like when the teacher is handing out graded exams and you’re pretty sure you bombed.
“What are you talking about?”
“You really need to get online more often. For all your talk about hacking code, or code-hacking, or whatever—”
I stop him before he can go off on another tangent. “What were you saying about the freshmen?”
“Oh, right,” Bunker says, handing me his phone. “I’d look like a sweaty mess in desperate need of a shower. Thanks to the born-with-it tan and six-pack abs, you manage to look like a glistening Adonis.”
I take the phone and give Bunker a look that says, Stop saying crap like that.
There’s the photo on Twitter—my expression looking like someone just told me I won the Powerball instead of the fear and anger I felt at the time—along with a caption: See Prettyboy run. My stomach drops, but only for a second, before my brain pushes that reflexive feeling away. They posted it last night to the account @CarlisleAcademy, and so far, it has been retweeted a couple hundred times.
Wow. That’s kind of a lot, but I pretend like I’m not worried about it. The hacker has no idea I’m on his tail, and no idea what I look like. He was only at the compound for a few hours before my team’s incursion and, on the off chance he saw me, it had to have been from a distance. I look a helluva lot different than I did then, and not just from the addition of eyeglasses. Here, I’m clean-shaven and let my hair grow out into a high fade. In Ukraine, my hair was barely there and I had ditched my razor for a few weeks.
“You and a few of her closest friends are the only ones who even care,” I say, returning his phone. “Stop worrying. It ain’t nothing but a thing.”
And it really isn’t, when I consider why I’m even at Carlisle. I was there when Rogers vouched for me, saying I had the makings of a great operative. I may be on suspension, tasked with an assignment-not-really, and everyone in the office probably thinks Early Bird is a horrible idea after my Ukraine performance, but I see it as my shot at redemption, and I don’t plan to screw it up.
CHAPTER 3
After the first-period bell rings, I put the photo out of my mind and replace it with the other thing that has kept me up worrying more than a few nights, which isn’t hard to do since she sits two rows in front of me.
Katie Carmichael is the “her” Bunker thinks might want to know about the nonexistent Darlene. But he couldn’t be more wrong. I could spontaneously combust right here in front of Mr. Maitland’s World Geo class, and she wouldn’t bother to throw the contents of her water bottle on me.
As I walk down the row to my desk, I pretend I don’t even see Katie. But I must fail miserably. She makes a point of turning to ask a question of the girl next to her, going out of her way to be oblivious to me.
Bunker notices it too, and whispers, “Oooh, it’s chilly in here. Guess you were right,” as we take our seats beside each other.
Maybe I should back up a minute, because I’ve probably presented Katie in a poor light when she isn’t the bad guy in our failed equation. That’s totally on me. I was initially focused on her because I thought she was the hacker I’m after. She was new to Carlisle, like Bunker and me, which automatically put her on my list. I’d been tracking my target through his signature, which is how some hackers mark their work. Sort of the way taggers tag their graffiti. It seems counterintuitive for a hacker to leave clues, especially one who has been trying—unsuccessfully, thanks to yours truly—to infiltrate our national security agencies, but some are so impressed with their own skills, they taunt hacker-trackers like me into trying to catch them. Sounds stupid, but these guys are actually geniuses. The type who tag their work are also classic narcissists. Aka assholes on crack.
Katie is not that, despite the whole wouldn’t-put-me-out-if-I-was-on-fire thing. Not that I can blame her. In eight short weeks, she’s become Carlisle’s star soccer player. She’s already poised to take the crown away from whoever won last year’s Most Popular Girl Ever. And the engineering club overthrew their three-term president in favor of Katie Carmichael as their leader. But don’t cry for the deposed ex-president. He took her to homecoming. That’s Katie’s problem, and mine: her unassailable likability. And the fact that she’s drop-dead hot. Plus, she’s got that English accent. Even the way she pronounces my name, Pee-tah, makes me—
“Mr. Smith, did you hear me, or is communication with you an exercise in futility this morning? Hello—is anyone home?”
I’m so focused on staring at the back of Katie’s head that Maitland startles me nearly out of my seat, appearing out of nowhere and rapping his knuckles on my desk.
“Um … I … uh … I mean, what was the question, sir?”
“Brilliant. Scintillating. But don’t overexert yourself for our sakes,” Maitland says, being his usual special self. The guy hates me for reasons unknown.
“Sorry, I’m a little sleepy this morning. Stayed up too late last night watching Seabiscuit. Ever seen that movie, Mr. Maitland?”
He gives me the evil eye but doesn’t say another word about my lack of brilliance. Oh, riiight, that’s the reason he hates me. A while back, I arrived at his class early, hoping to corner Katie into having more than a one-word conversation, but caught Maitland on the phone making book on a horse. He tried to play it off, but I knew his game. Before I discovered the money I could make from hacking, one of my hustles was hunting unclaimed betting tickets.
I’d take a Greyhound from Atlanta to the Birmingham dog track, sneak inside, and spend the whole weekend picking tickets off the ground, left there by people who didn’t have time to stand in line to cash out a five- or ten-dollar ticket. Cash in enough of them, though? Even after I’d pay out my partner—I’ve always been a decent con artist, but no teller is going to cash tickets for a twelve-year-old—I’d clear two or three hundred dollars and get back home before the truancy officer could report me to Children’s Services. It was easy enough as long as I had a half-assed foster family—and I had a few—who looked the other way if I spent a night or two away from home, so long as they got their tiny government check.
So, I know a pick-six from a superfecta. Both are pretty desperate bets, and I overheard Maitland place big money on both. I called him on it, and he called it the “sport of kings,” like giving it a snob name could cover the fact that he was violating Carlisle’s code of ethics. Yeah, I see you, Maitland. And he knows it, which is why he moves on to other prey.
“Ms. Carmichael, perhaps you can enlighten us?”
When Katie looks back at me, I detect a fleeting glimmer of sympathy. Or maybe not, since the eye-roll she gives me is not quite as fleeting. That I read clearly. Then she dismisses me with a toss of that dark, shiny hair I remember smelled so good and made me think of strawberries and vanilla cream. Even her hair smells English.
“Charlemagne’s march across Europe and his subsequent formation of the Carolingian Empire was driven by his desire to spread Christianity,” she says. “But his success in conquering the Saxons pointed to the possibility that he was motivated by territorial aggrandizement as much as religious fervor.”
For three seconds, the whole room is quiet—even Maitland, who is never at a loss for words. Intelligence delivered in that accent? Katie Carmichael can make even “territorial aggrandizement” sound good. I mean, she’s perfect, in a good way. I just can’t believe she could be the one who tried to crack NORAD a few months ago.
Plus, when you look like her—olive skin that kinda seems to glow, brown eyes with flecks of something else in them, and her lips—well, why waste all that sitting in a room behind a computer? The bad guys would have to be idiots not to put an operative like that to better use in the field, no matter how mad her cracking skills are. That’s one reason why I ruled her out as the hacker. She’s brilliant, gorgeous, and the complete opposite of an asshole. Everyone loves Katie, including Maitland, and the only other thing he seems to love is hearing himself speak.
I had to end things the morning after our first real date—dinner and a movie in town, followed by half an hour in the back seat of her car making out. There’s another thing she could win awards for. She’s the best kisser.
Of course I wanted more. What guy doesn’t want more? But with Katie, just the kissing was enough to let me know she’d be the kind of distraction I couldn’t risk. My target could be sitting right next to me decoding the Pentagon’s cipher algorithms, but if Katie walked into the room, I’d probably be like, Whatever, dude. Go for it. So yeah, I dropped the it’s-me-not-you bomb on her the next morning, which also happened to be the day before I was supposed to take her to homecoming.
So you can understand why she hates me.
“… he not only shaped the new Holy Roman Empire,” Katie is saying as she wraps up her answer, “but continued to influence French monarchs a thousand years after his death, as we’ll see next semester when studying Bonaparte and the rise of the Napoleonic Empire.”
While we’re all absorbing the English-accented knowledge that has just been dropped on us, a screeching fire alarm breaks us all from our Katie Carmichael trance.
My fear instinct kicks in, but it subsides when I remind myself that this is probably a surprise drill or a prank. As we’ve all been instructed since kindergarten, no matter which school we attended, we keep calm and walk in single file out of the classroom and into the hall. The building is shaped like a U, and at the end of each arm is a stairwell and exit leading to the parking lot. We all follow the escape route we practiced at the beginning of the school year and head for the stairwell at the end of the corridor.
Prettyboy Must Die Page 3