“And ours. Remember, we had him first,” Katie says.
“This thing is bigger than us or our countries. I see why you were worried about all seven billion of us. Terrorists could gain access to the most powerful weapons arsenal in the world. Well, I mean, access to two of the most powerful arsenals in the world.”
We both know that comparing our military capacity to theirs is like comparing a shoulder-launched surface-to-air missile to a Super Soaker, but I figure it doesn’t hurt to throw Katie and the Brits a bone. I figure wrong.
“Do you know what I hate more than guys telling me not to worry?” Katie asks.
“Um, no?” Actually, I do, because I saw what happened to Marchuk.
“Guys condescending to me. Now get out of my way before I make you regret doing that.”
I do, but with every intention of following her, because in all my worrying about the matchbook stuck in the front door, then Duncan sitting in my seat and harassing me about the Twitter thing, I didn’t notice that Joel wasn’t at my table today.
“You went AWOL during the fire drill—did that have anything to do with Joel?”
“You noticed, huh?” Katie asks, but answers her own question before I can. “Of course. You’re an operative. Joel was in the class across from ours, and since they were lined up in the hall alongside us, I plucked him out and showed him a secret hiding place. I told him about the chatter this morning and that he should go there if he had even the slightest worry.”
“So Joel knows you’re MI6?”
“He thinks I’m the same person I was when I protected him in London—part of a private security team hired by his father. I was undercover and went to school with him. We made sure I was in all of his classes. There have been threats to his family before this one,” Katie explains. “Anyway, I sincerely hope he’s in that safe room right now, waiting for me to come give him word that it’s safe to leave.”
“That’s why you didn’t want me to kill Koval—in case he’d somehow gotten to Joel.”
So much is making sense now. I wished she’d trusted me enough to tell me earlier. Maybe I’d have risked going through that stairwell door, even though I’d still have kept her from going.
“I was ninety-nine percent certain Joel was okay, but that one percent was enough to worry me, especially after Marchuk talked about Koval moving packages. I needed to confirm Koval hadn’t gotten to Joel first and taken him somewhere I’d never find. But we ran into him in the hall and he grabbed me. Then we got locked out on the roof. Then Berg came—”
“But I slowed you down trying to save Bunker, and then you had to come save us both.”
“Of course, I wanted to help you, but I also hoped Koval would be here with Joel. When he wasn’t … and now that we know about the groundskeeper’s tunnel…”
Katie doesn’t—or can’t—finish her thought. I want to do for her what she did for me up on the roof. Make her feel the mission is still viable.
“No, I’m certain Koval hasn’t taken him from the building. Joel never showed up in my chem lab and wasn’t there when the hostiles invaded. As long as they didn’t find out where you told him to hide, Joel should still be here.”
“We need to get to the main office,” Katie says, heading for the stairs.
I follow her, and Bunker takes that as his cue to rejoin us.
“That’s where you’re hiding him?” I ask. “The school is swarming with CIA and locals, with the highest concentration of them probably in the office.”
“Not in the office. Across from it.”
“Across from the office is the trophy case,” Bunker points out.
“Exactly,” Katie says as though that should explain everything.
Carlisle’s trophy case is nothing like you’d find in any other school. For one thing, it takes up nearly the whole wall opposite the office. There are a lot of famous people out there who made their earliest marks on the world while they were at Carlisle, so the case holds not only awards they earned here, but recognition for whatever they did after. We’ve had two governors, one secretary of defense, an opera singer, so many Nobel prize winners and MacArthur grant recipients that it’s embarrassing, and even a couple of Olympic medalists despite Carlisle’s fairly sad sports tradition.
“Ah, the trophy case,” I say. The case is so big there’s an alcove at either end, both with doors to access the back of it. “We should take the stairs that come out on the end farthest from the office. Then it’s only a few steps to the alcove.”
“Won’t it be locked?” Bunker asks.
“There are only two sets of keys as far as I know, and I lifted both from the office earlier this morning. Joel has one and I have the other,” Katie explains. “Plus, we always have you. With all those muscles, in a pinch you could probably just knock the door in, right?”
Bunker just starts beaming, but it’s hard to tell whether she’s for-real flirting with him or spy-flirting. You should never trust anything a spy tells you. We don’t always know how to separate truth from truthiness. Still, I do feel a little twinge of jealousy.
Luckily, Berg’s team hasn’t begun searching the lowest level of the building yet, so we reach the first floor with no problem. Katie is about to open the door to check whether the coast is clear, but Bunker stops her.
“Let me. It’s okay if they catch me. If there’s a cop right outside the door, you guys can go back the way you came and let me take one for the team.”
Katie puts a hand on his arm and says, “Oh, Bunk-ah. You’re so gallant.”
Bunker starts grinning until he catches the evil look I’m throwing at him and cracks the door open before closing it again. “So here’s the situation. There are two uniforms guarding the office, which now appears to be the command center. I ascertained—”
“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.”