“Ignore him. He’s watched too many bad spy movies,” I say, elbowing Bunker out of my way so I can take a look myself. “Their backs are to us. Bunker, you wait here—fewer people to get caught trying to access the trophy case.”
“But I can be your lookout,” Bunker offers.
“Be our lookout from here,” I tell him. “Call me if you see anyone coming.”
“I don’t want to risk using my walkie-phone and messing anything up since we have the confession on it, and Sveta took my real phone,” Bunker says, looking sheepish.
I remove the password lock from my phone and hand it to him. “Call Katie. Her number’s in there.”
“It is?” Katie asks.
“From before, when we … when I thought I might need it again.”
Katie smiles at me.
Fortunately, Bunker doesn’t protest being left behind, and Katie and I are able to move from the stairwell to the alcove undetected. We both stand in the shadows until she can get the door unlocked. Once inside, Katie turns on her flashlight and I can see that we’re in a sort of hallway that runs parallel to the trophy case, a wall on one side, sliding doors to access the case on the other. But it doesn’t run the full length of the case. It stops about midway, ending in what looks like a closet, probably accessible from the other alcove in a mirror image. It’s a great hiding place.
Except it isn’t. When Katie opens the closet door, Joel isn’t there.
Now we know what Sveta meant when she said we were too late.
CHAPTER 28
It takes a second for me to process what I see. All this time I’d thought at least one of my friends had escaped this day of terror, but instead of finding Joel, we find Jonesy, bound and gagged. He hadn’t gone home with a bad headache before the incursion began. So how did he get here? And has he been here the whole time? But now I know where that roll of duct tape disappeared to. Jones was bound and gagged by his own office supplies.
When I go to remove the gag, Katie stops me.
“How do we know he isn’t one of them?”
“Because he’s my friend,” I say.
“So was I, and you didn’t have a clue who I really was.”
She has me there, so I step away from Jones, but only for a second. “Whether he’s a good guy or bad, we still need him to talk.”
Katie rummages around in her purse and pulls out … a tube of lipstick. Okay.
“Don’t even think about screaming,” she says, putting the lipstick near Jonesy’s neck. “I have three million volts aimed at your sternocleidomastoid.”
Of course Katie has a stun gun. And exceptional knowledge of human anatomy.
“I thought you’d gotten out. How did you get here, all tied up?” I ask Jones as I remove the gag and then immediately step away from him. I’m not as suspicious as Katie, but I’m also not dumb.
“Save the reunion for later,” Katie interrupts. “Where’s Joel?”
Jones flexes his mouth and jaw muscles, trying to recover from wearing the gag. “Well, that was annoying. Can you untie my hands?” Jones asks. He’s so calm about it that I’m wondering if Katie is right.
“No, we cannot.” Katie moves the stun gun a hair closer to Jones’s sterno-whatever. “Answer the question.”
“As you’ll recall, Ms. Carmichael, this morning you came by asking to look through the lost-and-found closet. I’d stepped into Ms. Dodson’s office while you were allegedly looking for your missing umbrella, but when I returned just ten seconds later, I noticed two sets of keys were missing from the key cabinet, the ones to the trophy case. And so were you. Then during the fire drill, I watched you extract Joel Easter from his class’s line and take him to the alcove. I put two and two together—”
“I wanted to show Joel where to hide out in case anything happened. It’s you who shouldn’t be here,” Katie says. “And you’re the observant one, aren’t you? A little too observant to just be the office guy, don’t you think, Peter?”
I do actually, but I don’t want to believe Jonesy is a bad guy since, until now, he was my only other friend at Carlisle. “Finish your story, Jones.”
“I’d been sick all morning, hungover—I told you about that, Jake, remember? Anyway, I was in the bathroom when all the announcements began, so I stayed in there, hiding out. Then, when I heard your announcement … well, it sounded crazy and I figured a brother couldn’t make up some shit like that. So I came here to hide out.”
“But I had all the keys.”
“Not all,” Jones says, smiling a little bit.
We hear the crackling sound of a stun gun being turned on.
I shake my head at Katie and she turns it off.
“Jones, you might want to get to the part about Joel going missing, if you know anything about it.”
“I figured whoever was looking for you would sweep the building and check the bathrooms, so I came here.” Considering Katie has been threatening to Taser him in a critical section of the circulatory system, Jones is pretty chill in recounting his story. As if he’s been rehearsing it. “That’s when I found Joel. We thought we’d hide out here until help came, but he came first.”
“Who?” Katie asks.
“The janitor.”
Koval.
“I swear to God, when we find that guy, we need to end him once and for all,” I say.
“And you just let him in?” Katie asks Jones. “Are you kidding me? If Joel is hurt … maybe you really are just the office guy if you’d let—”
“I didn’t have to let him in. He’s the janitor. He had a key. So he says he’s looking for a place to hide out, too. He said he saw one of these terrorists coming—”
“Who said anything about them being terrorists? As far as you know, they’re bank robbers,” Katie asks. “And you certainly know the lingo, don’t you? Sweep the building and extract Joel. Civilians don’t talk like that, Peter.”
I ignore Katie, even though she’s sounding more and more convincing. “Then what happened?”
“The janitor put a choke hold on me. That guy is huge. He could choke hold a grizzly. When I came to, I was bound and they both were gone.”
“Sorry, Peter, but I don’t buy it,” Katie says. “He’s probably some kind of decoy. If he were simply Joe Blow office worker, wouldn’t Koval have just killed him?”
“Mr. Smith, what’s going on?” Jones asks. “Who is she? Who are you, for that matter?”
Katie answers before I can. “He’s Mr. Smith about as much as you’re Mr. Jones. Can’t you Americans get a little more creative with the cover names? Here, hold this.”
Katie hands me the lipstick stun gun and before I can stop her, she jabs a syringe into Jonesy’s arm.
“Again with the tranquilizer? I’m sure Jonesy is a good guy.” Well, pretty sure. “Before he knocked out Jones, Koval might have inadvertently dropped a clue to where he was taking Joel. He was trying to tell us—”
“He was wasting our time,” Katie explains, “and he’s probably one of them.”
“A black spy from Ukraine?”
“They do have black people in Ukraine, you know. When you were there, you fit in just fine, apparently,” Katie reminds me. “But no, I figure him for a hired mercenary, like the one with the New York accent, or the groundskeeper.”
Katie is great and everything, but her inability to see anything but black and white, good and evil, is making me a little crazy. People aren’t that easy. I’m a hacker, but even I realize real life isn’t so binary. Neither is the spy game.
“I may not have a bottomless bag of spy supplies like you, but one thing I know is people. Jones is a good guy. I trust him.”
“Sorry, but I don’t. But if you’re right, he’ll appreciate that we did it to save Joel. Besides, that was the last of my carfentanil, and it was barely a drop. He’s probably just asleep, not really unconscious, which means he won’t be out for very long, so let’s get moving. I just hope Joel is still in the building.”
I’m
about to follow her, but something stops me.
“Wait. Hear that?” I ask Katie.
“What am I supposed to be hearing?”
“Voices…”
“Are they telling you where we can find Joel? Otherwise—”
“Not in my head. Out in the hallway.”
“Who is it?”
“Dodson. Berg’s team must have located the office staff in the auditorium,” I whisper, stepping over Jones and heading out the other side of the closet. “Andrews was guarding them, which means Berg should know by now that she’s a dirty cop. If there were only six as we suspected, that just leaves Koval to capture. And his sister.”
“Peter,” Katie says, following me.
I put a finger to Katie’s lips. “Shhh. If we can hear them, they can hear us. They might give us some intel. Maybe Dodson and her staff were kept in the same place as Joel.”
Katie must see the logic in this because she stays quiet.
“That’s him. That’s the one who said he was a detective,” Dodson says, and I’m guessing she’s pointing out Marchuk, who must still be in the office where we left him unconscious. “The other one was a woman named Andrews. She had a radio, a badge, knew a lot about the area. She was very convincing as a police officer. How was I to know they weren’t real?”
“Thank you, ma’am. You and your staff can go with these officers so they can get your official statements. Don’t worry,” Berg is saying. “They’re the real deal.”
There is some murmuring of voices I can’t decipher, probably the rest of the office staff talking low, still in shock, and then Dodson adds from farther down the hall, “We’re still missing one. My assistant’s assistant disappeared just before everything happened, and we haven’t heard from him. I fear they have him.”
“Thank you, Ms. Dodson. We’ll find him.”
For a moment, I only hear the clicking of Dodson’s heels down the hall, and then another male voice asks, “You think the assistant was one of their inside men?” I recognize it as Berg’s second-in-command, from up on the roof. I’m beginning to wonder if I’m the only one who doesn’t suspect Jonesy, and whether that’s a bad idea.
Katie tugs on my shirt sleeve and points at Jones. “We need to get out of here before they start looking for him.”
I’m about to follow her back the way we came, but Berg says something that makes me stay.
“I don’t know, but the local PD is saying they have one missing, too. This Andrews person was so convincing to the principal because she wasn’t pretending. That stupid kid wasn’t being paranoid—not about the dirty cop, anyway.”
“You think there’s some truth in his story about the hacker being on the other side?” the second one asks.
“It may have been a mistake to ignore him. I can’t mess this thing up, Hudson. Rogers and I are both up for that promotion, and it’s mine if I can show the assistant director how idiotic her nursery-school initiative is. I’ve got a local uniform watching him. I’ll get her to bring him back in here.”
There is a thirty-second pause in their conversation, long enough for Berg to radio the officer in charge of me. Then Berg says, “Are you fucking kidding me? I gave you one job: to watch a seventeen-year-old kid.”
“I think I just got that cop in trouble,” I whisper to Katie.
“In the uniform’s defense,” Hudson is saying, “the kid’s a seventeen-year-old highly trained operative, no matter what you think of Rogers’s program. And apparently not bad at it. He neutralized four of six known hostiles and identified one as a rogue cop. What if he’s also right about the hacker being responsible for—”
“Shut up, Hudson.”
There’s a brief silence before Hudson speaks again.
“So … new objectives?”
“Objective, singular. Let the locals handle their dirty cop. Find that goddamn kid.”
CHAPTER 29
I’m kinda surprised when we return to find Bunker right where we left him. But I’m glad to find he not only hasn’t been captured, but he’s looking a lot less green than he did in the basement.
“Where’s Joel?” he asks.
“Koval got to him first,” Katie explains. “We don’t even know if they’re still in the building. Wherever they are, we need to find them before Koval can leave town. Or the country. I don’t even want to think about what he might do to Joel.”
“Yeah, but we’d better be armed with more than a couple of screwdrivers and a Sharpie, which is all I got.”
Bunker starts smiling, so I know he’s been up to something. “Well, I can help with that. While you guys were gone, I did a little intel-gathering of my own.”
“Oh, jeez, what did you do, Bunk?”
“Called your boss. Or who I figured was your boss, because it was the last number you dialed and it had a 202 area code—I’ve memorized all the area codes,” he adds for Katie’s benefit. For some reason, his father thought it was important to take a phone book into the bomb shelter with him. Maybe he didn’t think they’d be in there for fifteen years. Not only had Bunker memorized all the area codes, but he can tell you the address of everyone in Tucumcari, New Mexico, up to Richard Beckman, at least as of 1999.
“Um, why?” I ask, afraid to hear the reason.
“Figured while I waited for you guys to come back, I could get some information about this Koval person.”
“And how did that go?” I ask, afraid to hear the answer.
“First she yelled at me for having your phone. Then she yelled about you giving me your phone. Then she interrogated me, asking questions only my dad and I should know, to make sure I was who I said I was. And what’s up with those questions? Don’t ever call my dad paranoid again, because clearly Big Brother has been watching.”
“So what did she say, Bunker?” Katie asks, not especially interested in Bunk’s fears about government overreach.
One day I’ll have to explain to him that the minute he became my friend, Rogers probably opened a file on him and his father.
“I expect her to call back any minute,” Bunker says just as his phone vibrates.
Or my phone, and he’s about to answer it.
“Give me that,” I say, grabbing it from him.
“You’re really onto something here,” Rogers says when I answer. “Your friend caught me up on what you know so far—and, by the way, we’ll need to have a long chat about that. Giving him your phone will definitely be a problem for your next performance review.”
“But boss—”
“I said later, Smith. Let’s deal with the bigger problem right now. There has been chatter for weeks now that Vadim Koval has been planning a hostile takeover of Marchuk’s arms trade while also proving to the terrorist world that he can provide even better service than the old man did. I’ve got some people gathering more intel. We should have a report for Berg in the next half hour. You need to bring him in on this, Smith,” Rogers warns. “Don’t try doing this by yourself.”
“Not that Berg would ever listen to me, but I don’t need his help. But no worries. I have backup.”
“Smith, I’m warning—”
“Sorry, boss. Gotta go.”
After I hang up, I relay the intel to Bunker and Katie.
“I’m calling MI6 if your Berg won’t help us find Joel,” she says, taking out her phone. “We need officers at every airport in the metro area, every train station, roadblocks on every road out of this state.”
“Hold on, Katie. Y’all can’t run operations on our soil. At least not overt ones, and all of that sounds pretty overt to me.”
My phone starts vibrating again. It’s the third call since I hung up on Rogers. She is so going to kill me.
“Not so fast,” says a woman’s voice on the stairs above us.
Uh oh. Rogers is going to have to wait in line.
It’s Andrews, and she looks like she wants to kill someone. Or three someones. I need to think of a way out of this on the quick.
“We
’ve been busted,” Bunker says. “I guess my spy days are over.”
“Wow. This is one busy stairwell. You’d think Berg would have checked it out, with it being just down the hall from his command center,” I say, a little more loudly than necessary. “And Bunk, I’m guessing all your days are over if it’s up to her. Don’t believe the uniform. She’s no more a good guy than her partner Marchuk is.”
“Hands out of your pockets. Slowly,” she orders, pointing her gun at me. I comply.
She doesn’t have to ask Bunker, whose face has gone back to a shade of about-to-puke green. He already has his arms raised, though I’m worried he might faint any second. Katie doesn’t look sick at all. She looks like she’s thinking about charging Andrews and killing her with her bare hands.
Which is why Andrews turns the gun on Katie. “And you. Did I just hear you say you were MI6? What the hell is the world coming to? They’re hiring officers who haven’t even finished their growth spurts, but I apply for the FBI, DHS, and CIA, and not a single one will take me.”
“Uh, because you’re a dirty cop?” I offer, hoping to distract Andrews for a minute by getting her to talk about herself. It worked on Sveta, except Katie won’t be crashing through the ceiling. “I’m pretty sure that silencer attachment on your pistol isn’t standard issue from the police department’s gun vault. Police—at least not good cops—don’t use silencers.”
“They didn’t know I was dirty. And I didn’t go to the other side until after they rejected me. I got sick of playing by the good ol’ boys’ rules.”
“So you turned traitor to your country because you were rejected by some boys?” Katie asks. “You should be kicked out of the girl club now.”
“Please. That’s all you are—a girl. I’ve been a cop longer than you’ve been alive. The struggle is real for a sister in uniform. Still in uniform, still working a beat. Passed up for promotions by—”
“Better cops than you?” I say.
Prettyboy Must Die Page 18