“Where’s the notebook?” Alpha demands.
“In a safe place.” I try to keep my voice as calm and flat as I can. Because the truth of the matter is that I have that notebook tucked into the back of my jeans, and I can’t believe in this moment that I have it with me. So stupid.
“You’re going to need to get it.”
“No problem.” I smile. “Just let me go, and I’ll fetch it for you right away.”
Alpha doesn’t blink. “Nice try,” he says, but I know that he’s at a crossroads, same as I am. He needs that notebook back so he can destroy it. And I need to keep holding on to it.
Alpha walks over to a Bunsen burner set on the first row of tables. He switches it on, and it sputters a second before the smell of propane wafts toward me and a blue flame flickers up and sends my stomach plunging into a frigid ocean of fear.
“Do you want to do this the easy way or the hard way?” Alpha asks. His voice is changing. There’s desperation in it.
I don’t answer. I stare at the flame.
“Where is the notebook?” Alpha barks.
“I don’t have it!”
And then before I know what’s happening, Alpha grabs me and yanks me to the first row. His fist clenches around my wrist, and I turn and scream and kick; but he has me pressed against the table, and I can’t move. My hand lowers toward the flame, and the heat pricks my palm. Tears roll down my face and I choke.
“Why?” I sputter. “Why are you doing this to me?”
And then the flame goes out, and the Bunsen burner goes crashing to the floor. It clatters against the linoleum. He unhands me, and I stumble back, gasping and panting and shaking.
Alpha raises the gun and points it at me, and I flinch. But only for a second. Because then I look at his eyes. Something’s changed. They’re still dangerous, but now there’s fear and resignation lurking behind them. I need to act.
I raise my hands so that they’re chin level and slowly extend my right. “Give me the gun.”
Alpha doesn’t lower the gun, but he also doesn’t put his finger on the trigger.
“Please give me the gun,” I say. “My dad wouldn’t want this.”
Alpha blinks but doesn’t say anything.
“You and my dad were friends,” I say. Right up until the point you had him killed.
I stare at Alpha’s hand. The one holding the gun. Waiting for any sign, any moment of hesitation or relaxation.
“I never meant . . .” Alpha’s eyes shift from me to the side, and I take my chance. I leap at the gun. I grab on to it and try to force it down, but then Alpha snaps back to attention and twists away from me. He raises it to my forehead, and I suck in my breath.
“Stop it!” he yells. “I told you I was anticipating that!”
“You don’t want to hurt me,” I whisper. “I know you don’t.”
He doesn’t respond, but I know I’m right.
I think of the hostage negotiation training I had right here on this campus and choose my words carefully. “Tell me what happened. Why you got mixed up with this in the first place. I’m sure it’s not your fault.” It’s a lie. He’s totally to blame. But I need him on my side.
“I can’t fight them,” Alpha says. “They’re too dangerous.”
Yes!
“Who? Who’s too dangerous?”
“XP.”
Chills race up my arms. “Who is XP?”
Alpha shakes his head, as if he’s trying to snap himself back to being the collected, professional, authoritative figure I’ve always known, not this man who’s on the verge of breaking.
“I’m not dragging you into it.”
“I’m already in it!”
“Not like this.” And then he lowers the gun. He’s still staring at me, and for once I see the glimpse of a different man. A man who’s regretful. A man who knows he’s defeated. I hold out my hand for the gun. He waits—staring, reflecting—and then he starts to hand it to me.
“What the hell are you doing, Julian?”
The door opens behind me, and Alpha retracts his hand and jumps back. I whip my head around to see Headmaster Vaughn walk in. His silver eyebrows rise when he sees me. “Hello, Amanda.”
He’s a man I used to admire, someone I used to want to emulate. He fought in Korea. He was a spy during the Cold War (well, this is unconfirmed but highly rumored). He was a close adviser to two presidents. He treated his students with dignity and respect. He listened to us. Counseled us.
But all along he was buying the past, and now he’s standing here before me, not even trying to deny it.
“Hello, Cresty,” I say.
Vaughn’s mouth creeps up into an amused smile. “Amanda, dear, I know we’ve trained you better than that. I’ve seen your transcript.”
“What, don’t antagonize the enemy?”
“No, don’t be stupid in captivity. It could get you killed.”
With those words, everything fades away. The truth floats through the air and settles in my lungs. Vaughn is a bad man. A very bad man, and this situation is very real and very dangerous.
“Sit down,” Vaughn tells me.
“Don’t sit down,” Alpha says, the gun hanging to his side. He turns to Vaughn. “It’s over. Can’t you see that?”
“Nothing is over,” Vaughn says coolly. “You’re in this until the end. You knew the terms when you took the deal.”
“I want out,” Alpha says.
“Do you now?”
The two men stare at each other with such ferocity that I forget to breathe. This is a standoff to see who’s going to blink first. Vaughn does.
“Very well. Have it your way.”
And then I know what’s going to happen. I open my mouth to scream, but before a sound can form on my lips, Vaughn has reached into his shoulder holster, and there’s a Glock and a shot and Alpha crumples to the floor. Vaughn kicks Alpha’s gun out of his hand and sends it spiraling across the floor. It bangs against a trash can.
A scream is out of my lips before I can think. He was going to surrender; I know he was! I sway to the side and slam into the table. Vaughn grips his gun with his right hand and yanks my shoulder with his left.
“Shut up!” he says as he pushes me into a stool. “I told you to sit down.”
I lower onto the seat and look at the table. Not at the floor. But I can still see Alpha lying there in a puddle of red out of the corner of my eyes, so I close them.
“Start talking,” Vaughn orders. “I want to know everything you know. And please don’t insult me by lying. I spent thirty years training intelligence officers and then students to lie. I’m going to know.”
He’s right. I’m so dead.
Vaughn gives me a pointed look. “Talk!”
“I found Alpha’s mission ledger. I figured out how to decode it.”
He nods. “Mmm-hmm, very good. Now where is it?”
“It’s in a safe place.” That’s not exactly a lie.
“We’re not playing games right now,” Vaughn says. “You are going to tell me where that ledger is, and I am going to go get it.”
“And then what?”
“One step at a time.” Vaughn sets down the gun and places both hands flat on the table.
I slide my hands into my lap and then up on the underside of the table. I’m feeling for anything I can use as a weapon. A metal joint. A loose screw. Hell, even a sharpened pencil would be better than nothing. My hands feel something. A valve. And a tube. This is the advanced chemistry lab. And I mean advanced. So that means—
“Hands on the table,” Vaughn says. Dammit. Of course he would notice. I yank out the tube without moving more than a millimeter, then I place my hands flat on the table and touch the valve with my knee. I shift in my seat a tiny bit to see if it will turn. It does.
“Wher
e is the ledger?” Vaughn repeats. “You have thirty seconds to tell me.”
I don’t ask “or what?”; I shift again and turn the valve on full blast. This is either the most genius idea I’ve ever had or the decision that is sure to send me to an early grave.
“I’ll tell you where the ledger is if you tell me one thing.” My voice shakes. Dammit. I take a quick breath.
Vaughn raises an eyebrow but doesn’t respond.
“Why did you have Kennedy killed?”
Vaughn’s mouth creeps into a smile. “Not the question I thought you were going to ask. I thought you were going to ask if I ordered that your dad be killed on the mission, and for the record, the answer to that question is yes.” I don’t blink. He’s trying to throw me off guard. He is. My insides collapse into a puddle of anguish, and I feel vomit rise in my throat.
“Answer the question!”
Vaughn clucks. “You’re in no position to be making demands, Amanda.”
“I think I am. You want to know where the ledger is, and I’m willing to tell you. You just need to—”
“Because!” Vaughn yells. “Because Kennedy needed to be taken out if we were going to go into Vietnam. Kennedy negotiated a withdrawal in 1964. We needed Johnson to rush us into the Gulf of Tonkin and escalate the conflict. I knew Eagle could make a fortune off a war, so I studied the conflict, read the necessary classified documents, and made an educated guess.”
I blow out a breath. “You killed a president on a guess?”
“An educated guess,” Vaughn says. “Which turned out to be correct.”
I’m dizzy. I sway to the side and fall off the stool. My hands are on the floor, just inches from where a pool of blood begins. Vaughn just told me everything. He has no intention of letting me escape here alive.
But then a loud roar of voices erupts in the courtyard below. Vaughn is over at the window in a flash. I know that he sees them. The backups. The men from the helicopter. They must be storming the building as we speak. But I don’t have time to wait for them. Vaughn aims his gun at me and cocks the trigger.
“I wouldn’t do that if I was you,” I say as I push up. “You see, I turned on the hydrogen valve, so the gas is slowly seeping into the room. You do remember what happens if you mix hydrogen, oxygen, and fire, right?”
Vaughn looks at me with disbelieving eyes, and he’s at my side in a second. He bends under the desk to check, and I don’t think. I raise my elbow and bring it back down onto his neck.
Vaughn falls to the floor, and my training tells me to make sure he stays down, but my instinct has me scrambling to the door. Vaughn hops up and yanks me back. I swing. I connect with flesh. My hands and knees hit the ground. The ledger falls out of my back pocket. I gasp. Vaughn gasps. He pushes me out of the way and lunges for it. I grab on to his head and push him back. But his arms are longer. His fingers close around it. And then he pushes me to the ground as he rises.
I fly across the room to the trash can. Alpha’s gun is sitting on the floor next to it. I grab it, cock it, and aim it at the hydrogen valve.
“Drop it!” I order.
“You shoot that, you kill us both.”
“Don’t think I won’t do it.”
“That’s exactly what I think.”
A door bangs open down the hall. The backups! Vaughn rushes to the window. He’s going to jump! He’s going to escape.
I don’t think. I squeeze the trigger, and the room erupts in a burst of flames. My body is picked up and hurled back. I slam into the door, which opens, and I drop to the ground in the hallway. Black boots rush toward me. The world spins overhead. A voice I recognize. Abe. Abe is here. He’s over me, screaming and touching my face, and that’s the last thing I remember.
I come to in the back of an ambulance. It feels as if someone took a hammer to both of my temples. The door to the ambulance is open, so I see it’s parked in the middle of Peel’s quad.
“Hey,” a voice breathes next to me. I don’t have to look to know who it is.
“Abe,” I whisper. “What happened?”
Abe’s face appears over mine. He looks older to me. There are dark-blue bags under both of his eyes and dirt caked on his face. No. Not dirt—smoke. The explosion. I suck in my breath as it all comes back to me.
“Alpha?” I ask.
Abe presses his lips together. “Dead.”
I close my eyes and squeeze them as hard as I can. “He tried to surrender to me. He . . . he seemed truly sorry.” Life’s not black-and-white. Nothing ever is. There are very many shades of gray that litter the spectrum. Alpha wasn’t on the white side, but he wasn’t on the black side either, I’m starting to realize. Somewhere in there was a man who got caught up in something he couldn’t control. And while what he did is unforgivable, I did see glimpses of the man he could have been had he made better choices. I open my eyes and look at Abe.
He’s quiet for a few seconds. “If it’s any consolation, Vaughn survived. He’s pretty banged up, but he’ll live to answer for his crimes.” Then Abe’s face changes. “Close your eyes!”
I obey without question, and several moments pass before Abe finally says, “Clear.”
I open my eyes and raise an eyebrow.
“Investigators. Dozens of them. State and federal and higher-ups that you would not believe. They all want to talk to you. I figure you want to be left alone for a little while.”
“Talk to me?” I ask. “You mean interrogate me?”
“Probably.”
“It’s still my word against Vaughn’s, isn’t it?” I squeeze my eyes shut. “Nothing’s changed.”
Abe’s fingers interlace with mine, and he brings one of my hands to his mouth and kisses it. “Everything’s changed. They found a notebook by Vaughn. Half of it had been burned but the other half had a bunch of numbers and dates in it, and they’re trying to figure out what it all means. Plus, Annum Hall is probably being torn apart as we speak. Vaughn’s the one under investigation now, not you.”
I think of what Alpha said before he . . . before he died. One of his ramblings. XP knows. XP. I wonder if that’s related to Vaughn and Eagle Industries. It has to be. Why else would Alpha mention it? I wonder if XP is anywhere in that notebook.
Suddenly there’s a voice outside the ambulance. A crotchety, no-nonsense voice.
“I don’t care that you don’t want me in there; I’m going in there. Now stand aside.”
Ariel appears in the back of the ambulance.
“Abraham, help me up,” he says. Abe extends his hand to his grandfather and pulls him up into the ambulance. And then Ariel’s warm, familiar arms are around me. He’s holding me so close it’s like he’s my own family. And I realize that he is. He is my family. He always has been and always will be. I wrap my arms around him.
“You came through for me,” I say.
“I did.” Ariel sits up. “And I also failed you. I knew who you were the second Abraham called and said he’d met a girl. I knew and never told you. You were right. I knew the Guard was going to take you, although I had no idea they’d take you so soon.” He looks at Abe now. “I knew where she was, and I didn’t tell you.” His old eyes are sad, regretful.
“You didn’t know what Alpha was up to.” Abe says it like a fact, not like a guess.
“I did not.”
“Maybe I should have told you in 1963.” My voice is weak. My mouth is dry. I swallow. “Maybe you could have stopped Alpha from the start. Maybe then my dad—”
“Let your father go,” Ariel says. “I didn’t want you to tell me about the past, because I didn’t want it to influence my future behavior. And I’m glad you didn’t tell me, because now I’ve been able to watch the organization unfold over three generations; and there is no doubt in my mind that I no longer believe in it and will fight to shut it down.”
“But you found
ed it!”
“When I was very young and very naive. Back when I thought changing the past was the right thing. I no longer think it is. There’s a reason I never let my son join, as well as a reason the president himself received a phone call when I found out they’d taken Abraham.”
Abe takes my hand. “But I’m in the Guard now. If Amanda is in, I’m in.”
“No, you’re not,” Ariel says. “You’re done, and you’re going back to school, and you’re moving on with your life.”
“Grandpa!” Abe protests.
Ariel squeezes my hand again. “I can’t make that call for you. But I hope you’ll make the right decision.” Then he stands up as much as he can in an ambulance and backs his way to the door.
“We’re not done talking about this!” Abe throws at his grandfather.
“Yes,” Ariel says as he climbs down, “we are.”
Abe’s head whips back to me, and he leans down close. “I meant what I said. If you’re staying, I’m staying.”
“I don’t know what I’m doing,” I whisper. It’s the truth. My head is spinning in a million different directions. Between Alpha and Yellow and now Ariel and Abe, and I just want it to stop. I want it all to stop.
“Abe, I don’t know if I can do this.”
He takes my hand. “If it’s what you want, I’ll help you. We’ll both be Annum Guard together. And if it’s not what you want, we’ll both be CIA together. And if you’re sick and tired of everything, then we’ll just go be normal together. Go to college. Get a place together someday. You and me.”
Once upon a time that idea would have filled me with excitement. But now I don’t know. I don’t understand anything anymore.
“Abraham!” Ariel’s voice booms from outside the ambulance. “Now!”
Abe squeezes my hand. His eyes are moist. “I’ll find a way for us to be together. It will happen, Amanda. It will.”
I nod my head. Tears are forming in my eyes, and I don’t know how to hold them back. Abe lets go of my hand, breathes a good-bye, and disappears from the ambulance.
The Eighth Guardian (Annum Guard) Page 30