“Are you trying to remind me I’m the shortest guy in class, or what?”
“No, it’s just weird that I can’t see her,” I say as we pass through the rear exit doors and into the parking lot behind the school.
“Thought you didn’t care for that girl. You were really insistent about it twenty minutes ago.”
“I don’t care who she’s dating or whether she stays pissed with me forever, but I do care if she dies in a fiery inferno.”
“First off, did you detect even a whiff of smoke with that canine-like olfactory system of yours? Second, remain calm. It never helps to panic. There’s a reason the flight attendants always say that in airplane disaster movies.”
Bunker really needs to catch up on film from the last couple of decades, but I appreciate his advice. He could not be more on point. Still, where the hell is Katie?
“Now can you spot her?”
“If you can’t see her, how do you expect I can?”
Bunk’s right, it is a desperate question. But I’m beginning to feel a little desperate. I consider breaking formation, abandoning my class’s line and going back into the building, when I notice I’m being watched.
A few girls in the lines on either side of ours—one line from a freshman class, the other full of seniors—are staring at me. The freshmen are trying to hide the fact that they’re staring; the older girls aren’t trying to hide anything. A few of them smile, one winks suggestively, and … okay, that blonde at the back of the freshman line just mouthed something at me that makes me wish I didn’t read lips. Almost.
Like a car wreck you know you shouldn’t watch, I’m fixated on what the blond girl is suggesting we do after school, until Headmistress Dodson’s voice booms through a megaphone, snapping me out of it.
That’s when I realize who the blonde is—the girl who took my photo last night.
That’s also when I see the top of Katie’s head in the line, four people ahead of me, as though she’d never been missing.
CHAPTER 4
It turns out Bunker was right. Someone pulled an alarm and now Dodson is launching a full-scale investigation to find the culprit, which she just announced over the PA system in her usual I’m-not-screwing-around Voice-of-God way.
I’m in the cafeteria at lunch, trying to focus on my own investigation and ignore the growing number of stares I’m getting from Carlisle’s female population. Since that first-period fire drill, whispering and pointing have been added to the staring. As long as I don’t run into the slightly scary blond girl who must be the most aggressive freshman ever, I won’t worry too much about it. I’m peeved she started all this by tweeting my picture, but I can deal as long as she keeps it at the harmless crush level. After two months on campus, my suspect list is still a couple of suspects too long to get sidetracked by crazy-making women, Katie Carmichael included.
With Marchuk dead, the hacking mercenary may now be working for someone even more dangerous, though I’m still not sure why he chose Carlisle to hide out. My best guess is because it’s only ten miles from Boulder, home to several federal science agencies, one of which is working on quantum encryption technology to generate unbreakable codes to secure the nation’s defense systems. A lot of the lab’s scientists send their kids to Carlisle, and I’m thinking that’s how the hacker plans to get close to the facility—by making friends with some of those students, worming his way into their lives, and finally gaining the access I’ve been shutting down with his every attempt.
Not everything is hackable; sometimes real-life people have to make real-life incursions. For a hacker who has spent months trying to breach our security systems, breaking into the National Institute of Standards and Technology would be like reaching Epic tier in Dungeons and Dragons. All that encryption technology. All those lasers. So far, I’ve managed to rule out three people: Katie, Bunker, and Joel Easter. They, like everyone else on my list, were presumed guilty until proven innocent because they were new enrollees this year. Fortunately, that list is small—five suspects in all—because Carlisle rarely admits new students who aren’t part of the incoming freshman class, and I know my target isn’t a ninth grader. He could be a child genius, but the confidence, or arrogance, it takes to tag his work suggests he’s older.
Obviously, he could be a she—Katie made the list, after all—but the profile I created for the hacker says it’s a guy, so I call him a he, but I keep an open mind. Joel is a level-three legacy student, which means two generations of Easters before him attended Carlisle. So he was genetically destined to attend. He didn’t start until his junior year because his parents had lived in Europe until recently. Now that his family has returned stateside, he’s cashing in on his Carlisle legacy. Joel’s a nice guy, but I didn’t take him at his word on his backstory. I had my cubicle neighbor back at Langley look into it, and his story checks out. His father is one of the top laser scientists at NIST, which puts Joel in the potential asset category.
Clearing Bunker was easier. Thanks to his previous life as a troglodyte, he didn’t even know what the internet was until recently. Of course, his father knew all about it, but thought it was some kind of mind-control experiment funded by the government. Bunk’s backstory was confirmed by a Time magazine investigative report, as well as thorough psych evals conducted by The Journal of Applied Behavioral Research. Yeah, Bunker and his crazy dad are kinda famous.
And Katie … well, I already explained why it can’t be her. But in case my boss thinks I reached this conclusion because of hormones, I had her story checked too, and she totally doesn’t fit the profile. First off, Katie is all woman, and most hackers are not. Second, she has a well-documented family history through her aristocratic English father and an Indian maharaja grandfather on her mother’s side. Your average hacker-for-hire millionaire is only rich because hacking made him that way, not because he was born into it like Katie. Plus, I believe her when she says she chose Carlisle to improve her chances of acceptance at the local university’s optical physics program—aka laser science—the best in the country.
That leaves two other students on my list: one male, one female. I got so sidetracked by Katie for a while there, my intel on them is sketchy at best. All I know about the girl is that her family has been in the mining business for generations. What I know about the dude is that I cannot stand him and hope like hell he’s the one.
I’m looking over some notes I’ve made—indecipherable, of course—when I go to adjust my glasses and find them gone. In my defense, when you have perfect vision, it’s easy not to notice you’re missing your fake glasses for three and a half periods.
Oh, that’s right. I took them off to clean right about the time the fire alarm went off. I remember leaving them on the desk before we all filed out, but now that I think about it, they weren’t there when we returned. I was so focused on Katie’s disappearing act, I hadn’t noticed they were gone. Who the hell would take my glasses? Whoever it was will discover there’s zero prescription in them, just as Bunker suspected. Maybe he grabbed them for me. Or … could that be the reason Katie went missing? Did she notice I wasn’t wearing them and went back for them?