Also Known As

by Robin Benway

  “Well, shucks,” she said, but her grin was a mile wide.

  After huffing and puffing our way up eleven flights of stairs, Roux trailing behind Jesse and me, we arrived at 11N. The hallways were narrow and cramped, almost like an architectural version of intense pressure, and when we got to the door, the three of us stood and looked at it.

  “It’s all you, Mags,” Roux said. “Take it away!”

  “This is how you got into Gramercy Park,” Jesse added. “You really know what you’re doing.”

  “I appreciate the cheerleading,” I whispered as I knelt down to examine the lock, “but you might want to save it for whatever’s inside.”

  We knocked first, just in case Colton was home, but thankfully no one came to the door. I didn’t know what we would do if he was home, but I suspected that Roux would start pretending to sell Girl Scout cookies, and I wanted to avoid that sort of scene at all costs. “Okay,” I said. “Here we go.”

  I could feel Jesse and Roux breathing over my shoulders as I worked, sticking the tension wrench (otherwise known as a Bic pen cap) in the lock while using my bent paper clip to scrub at the pins inside. It wasn’t very loud, but in the quiet hallway, every move sounded like a gun blast.

  After two minutes, I got it. “Finally,” I muttered. “Took long enough.”

  “Will you show me how to do that?” Roux whispered.

  “Absolutely not.”

  “That’s cool.”

  We waited a few seconds, just in case Colton came bursting out, demanding to know who was breaking into his apartment, but all we heard was silence. An eerie, terrible silence, but silence just the same.

  Jesse, Roux, and I crept in on our tiptoes. It looked messy, like someone had been coming and going and not cleaning up after themselves: dust gathered on top of file cabinets, the parquet wood floors had a few layers of grime on top of them, and there were some copies of the New York Times that were from several weeks earlier. “Come on,” I said, “the coast is clear.”

  Jesse followed me as I started to poke around the apartment, looking at antique oil paintings on the wall and crumbs on a plate that sat on top of a stack of old New Yorkers. “There’s a safe here somewhere,” I told him. “We just need to find it.”

  “How do you know that it’s not somewhere in the filing cabinets?” Jesse said.

  “Too easy to access,” I replied. “These are important files, and without them, he has nothing to sell. No one will buy a PDF file without the source material to back it up.”

  “Right,” Jesse said. “Okay. So once we find this safe …?”

  “I’m going to open it.”

  “Hey, I’m making eye contact with a gargoyle!” Roux said, looking out one of the grimy windows. “I shall name him George.”

  “Make eye contact with a safe instead. Name it whatever you want.”

  “Aye-aye,” she said. “Later, George.”

  The three of us poked around the apartment for a few minutes. I couldn’t believe no one else could hear my heartbeat, it felt so loud in my ears. If my parents knew I was doing this, they would murder me, bring me back to life, and murder me again. I was going against the Collective, which no one did. Where that put me on the morality scale, I didn’t want to know.

  “Hey, Mags?” Jesse called from the bedroom. “I think this is it.”

  Roux and I followed his voice until we arrived in a barren room that held boxes; manila files; and a squat, stout safe. I let out a breath I didn’t know I had been holding. “Is this it?” Jesse asked. “It looks old.”

  “That’s it,” I said. It was the exact safe Angelo had let me play with when I was younger, before the kidnapping attempt. There was a brass fleur-de-lis etched into the side, and I put my finger in the groove and traced the pattern, just as I had done when I was little.

  “Nice to see you again,” I whispered. “Let’s play.”

  I unzipped my duffel bag and started to rifle through it. “What the hell is all that?” Jesse asked.

  “A diamond core drill,” I replied. “It can go through cobalt and it lets me use this.” I pulled out a tiny scope camera that had a monitor attached to it. “This lets me see where the grooves are in the lock. Each groove corresponds to a number on the combination and I just have to line them up.”

  Jesse and Roux looked at me like I was speaking Martian. “Where do you even get this stuff?”

  “Sweet Sixteen present from my parents.”

  Roux shook her head. “I got a Fabergé egg. What a ripoff.”

  I knelt down in front of the safe and looked at the combination lock. All the blueprints that I had memorized over the years were flooding back into my mind at a terrible speed. “It’s a Sargent and Greenleaf,” I murmured. “Model 6643. No drilling allowed.”

  “You’re getting all of that just by looking at it?” Jesse whispered.

  “Yes. If I try to drill, it’ll lock me out. Shit.” I took a deep breath and pulled my hair off my face. “There’re four wheels, too. Four numbers in the combination.”

  “How many possible combina—?” Roux started to ask.

  “A hundred million,” I said.

  Jesse muttered something unrepeatable under his breath.

  “I’ve opened this kind of safe a few times before just in practice, but not under pressure. Well, here goes nothing.”

  I started with the most basic combinations first, the ones that the manufacturer sets. I knew Colton would have changed them, but it was always the first thing I tried. 50-25-50-25. 10-20-30-40. 20-40-60-80. None of them worked.

  Jesse and Roux were absolutely silent as I started to turn the knob, waiting to feel the clicks against my fingertips. Angelo had trained me for this, putting toothpicks, feathers, Post-it notes on the gears of my practice combination locks, letting me find the tiniest whisper of a click.

  “What—?” Jesse started to say.

  “Ssshh,” I hissed at him. “I need to hear and feel everything right now.”

  The first number clicked in: thirty-eight. I could feel the wheel click into place, just a whisper of a sensation that my fingertips had been trained to find. “One down,” I whispered. “Three more to go.”

  Two minutes later, I had the second number. “Twenty-six,” I said. “Thirty-eight, twenty-six.”

  “You’re doing great,” Roux said. I could feel their collective nervous energy washing over me like waves, which only powered me forward. My legs were shaking from squatting in front of the safe, but I didn’t dare move. I didn’t want anything to ruin my zone.

  “Just so you know,” Jesse whispered, “this is a huge turn-on right now.”

  “Well, I try.” I spun the lock, feeling again and again for the third click. I used to get tired at this point, but Angelo never let me quit. All the clicks started to feel the same and I couldn’t tell if it was an important number or just a nerve twitch after twisting the dial nonstop for so long. “When it matters,” Angelo used to say, “you can’t quit.”

  Fifty-nine.

  “Shit, do you hear that?” Jesse whispered. “There’s footsteps.”

  Roux and I both looked up at him and the three of us listened. There were footsteps, heavy ones, like a man’s shoes. “It might be a neighbor,” Roux said.

  “It’s not a neighbor,” I told her. “He’s here.” I’ll never know how I knew that the mole was coming back to his burrow. I just did. It was instinctual, the way a deer senses a hunter. I turned back to the lock, desperate for that fourth number.

  “He’s here?” Roux gasped. “Are we going to die?”

  “Not today,” I told her. “Just get ready to run.” I was close, I could tell, so close to feeling that fourth click. “Come on,” I whispered. “Where are you?”

  “Maggie.” Jesse’s breathing was ragged. “He could have a gun.”

  Roux let out a whimper. “Maggie,” she whispered.

  A key was starting to turn in the front door.

  Eighty-two.

  The
safe popped open and I let out a breath as I pried open the door. It looked just as I had remembered it, an old banker’s safe with several compartments and a locked drawer. The files were lying on the bottom and I grabbed one and opened it up. My picture smiled back up at me.

  I took all of them, leaping to my feet and shoving everything in my duffel bag, leaving the drill and scope behind. “Run,” I said to Jesse and Roux, and the three of us turned and bolted out of the bedroom.

  A man was standing in the foyer, tall and muscular and younger than I had imagined him being, and I don’t think I’ll ever forget the look on his face when he saw the three of us come dashing down the hall and past him toward the front door. He was so surprised that he just gaped at first, but then he yelled “Maggie!” and the voice hit me like icy water.

  I was right. It was Colton Hooper.

  Roux flew past him, and he grabbed her wrist, wrenching her backward.

  “Roux!” I screamed. What had I been thinking, involving her and Jesse? They weren’t professionals, they weren’t trained for any of this, they were completely innocent and—

  “Let go of me!” Roux yelled, and even though she was half Colton’s size, she raised her other arm and brought the heel of her hand down directly on the bridge of his nose.

  The pop was loud, and he cried out and staggered back as blood started to gush down his face. His grip on Roux lost, she turned and ran out the front door. “Come on!” she cried. Colton hadn’t lost his footing, though, and started to follow us as we raced down the hall.

  “No elevators!” I cried. “Stairs, stairs, stairs!” We shoved the door open and started dashing down, two at a time, Jesse leading the way. “Roux, you okay?” he yelled as we flew past the tenth floor.

  “I’m amazing!” she yelled.

  She certainly was.

  He clattered above us, going down the spiral with only a floor or so to spare between us, and at one point I almost lost my footing, but Jesse righted me and we made it out into the lobby, shoving through the doors and out onto the sidewalk. I didn’t know where I was going, but I ran north, Jesse and Roux close on my heels, and Colton close on theirs. “Maggie!” I heard him scream at one point, his voice garbled from pain and blood, and hearing him say my name only made me run faster.

  We raced up Lexington, our feet pounding on the sidewalk. He never gave up chase and we flew through crowds, past drink vendors, running red lights and green lights and everything else in between.

  “Weave!” I yelled at Roux and Jesse. “Don’t run in a straight line!” I didn’t think Colton had a gun—we had taken him by surprise and then Roux had broken his nose, so there probably wasn’t time to grab one—but I wasn’t taking any chances.

  “Look out!” Jesse yelled as a group of tourists came to a sudden stop on the corner of Twenty-Fourth and Lexington. The three of us skidded and ran around them.

  “Asshole tourists! Learn to walk!” Roux screamed at them as we dashed past, giving them their first official New York Experience, I’m sure. I was too busy digging my phone out of my pocket, though. I knew I had to call someone for help. We could hail a cab, but that would give him too much time to catch up to us. We could go down into a subway station, but there was no guarantee that a train would be there, and even less guarantee that he wouldn’t end up on the same train as us. I couldn’t call my parents, not until we were safe.

  There was only one person I could call, and I prayed he would answer this time.

  He picked up on the second ring. “Maggie.”

  “Angelo!” I cried. “Angelo, I’m in trouble!”

  “Maggie, where—?”

  “I got the files. I stopped it, but Colton’s chasing us! He’s a mole!”

  “Who’s she talking to?” I heard Jesse yell over to Roux.

  “Probably the assassin!” she yelled back.

  “THE WHO?”

  “I didn’t tell anyone,” I said to Angelo. “My parents don’t even know. I broke into his apartment and I got the files and …” A huge stitch was starting to form in my side and I was gasping for air. Colton was still after us, but his breathing sounded wet and ragged. He was way too close, only six or seven steps behind us.

  “Maggie, where are you? Who’s with you?”

  “Jesse and Roux, and we’re on”—I glanced at a street sign as we ran across the street and almost got decked by two cabs—“Twenty-Ninth and Lexington! I don’t know where to go and he’s right behind us!”

  “Okay, Maggie. Listen to me, darling. Do you remember what we did for your eighth birthday?”

  Of all the things I thought Angelo was going to say, that wasn’t one of them. “My what?” I screamed. “Are you serious right now?”

  “Think, love.”

  “Of course I remember! What does that have to do with anything? We took a helicopter ride around Manhattan from the East Thirty-Fourth—oh.” I could already see a helicopter heading down the east side of Manhattan, no bigger than a dot, but I knew that Angelo was on his way.

  “I got your message, love, and I’m on my way back into the city right now. I’ll be there in six minutes.” And then his voice changed into something leaner and more dangerous than I had ever heard from him. “Do not let him catch you, Margaret, do you understand me?”

  I glanced over my shoulder and saw the anger on Colton’s face, the blood now dripping off his chin, and the shell-shocked pedestrians that we were leaving in our wake.

  “Got it,” I said, then hung up. “Come on!” I yelled to Roux and Jesse, then dashed across the intersection diagonally, barely dodging cars in our wake.

  “I am so glad,” Roux cried, “that I gave up smoking!”

  Ice hockey had apparently given Jesse some generous lung capacity, because he never fell behind, never even looked back. “Where are we going?” he said as we flew past a movie theater on Second Avenue. “Do you even know?”

  “Trust me,” I said. “Okay? Just trust me.”

  By the time we got across the FDR Drive, I could see the helicopter in the sky. Just knowing that Angelo was nearby made me feel a million times better, and I sprinted across the road and toward the helipad. I could feel the wind pick up as the helicopter made its descent, and just as it touched down, I turned back to look at Roux and Jesse, who were staring at the helicopter like they had never seen a flying machine before. “So,” I said to them. “Show of hands. Who’s been on a helicopter ride before?”

  The door slid open and Angelo was sitting at the controls, helmet and sunglasses on. The three of us ran to the helicopter, and Angelo put out his hand to help Roux in, then me, then Jesse. We fell into the seats, Roux and Jesse behind me, and I pulled the door shut and put on my own headset as Angelo rose back into the sky, Colton becoming smaller and smaller, angrier and angrier. My stomach nearly dropped out, and I grabbed onto the armrest, shutting my eyes for a second. “Steady, darling,” Angelo said. “You’re all right now. Safe and sound up here in the sky.”

  I took a deep breath and nodded. He was right. We were fine.

  “May I ask what happened to his nose?” Angelo asked over the headset.

  “Roux broke it!” I told him. Behind me, she was panting and pale, but she managed to give the finger to the man, who was still bleeding down on the tarmac.

  “You and I still make a lovely team, my dear.” Angelo looked at me and smiled. “Are you all right?”

  “Fine, fine.” I was pretty sure it was going to take a full day for my heartbeat to calm down, but I had the files in my bag. That was all that mattered.

  Jesse was panting for air, but when I glanced back at him, his face lit up in a smile and he started to laugh. “What the hell was that?” he asked. “Who are you?”

  “She’s awesome,” Roux told him. “We’re awesome.”

  And the helicopter sailed into the sky.

  Chapter 33

  By the time we landed at Battery Park, my parents were there waiting.

  And they were hysterical.

/>   It was sort of hard to hear what they were saying at first because they were squeezing me so hard, but I was able to make out, “… you THINKING?” and “GROUNDED FOR LIFE!” and “… could have DIED!” I didn’t care, though. I was so happy to see them that I just hugged them back as tightly as I could.

  And then they were letting go of me and hugging Angelo, then hugging Roux and Jesse, and then Angelo was hugging me, and then I was hugging Roux, and it was such a scene that you would have thought we hadn’t seen each other in fifteen years. I was exhilarated, nearly lightheaded with happiness, but that came to an end when I heard Angelo say, “We weren’t able to get him.”

  “The loft is the safest place,” I heard my mom say, and pretty soon we were being hustled into a car (my dad kicked out the driver and took the wheel; apparently no one was to be trusted) and heading back to our place.

  My parents, Angelo, and I put it on lockdown pretty fast. Lock codes were changed, phone SIM cards were put down the garbage disposal, and my dad yanked all the hard drives out of the computer and dunked them into a sinkful of water, while my mom scanned the rooms for bugs. “Are you two all right?” I asked Roux and Jesse, who were sitting at our table, both wide-eyed in astonishment. “Do you want something to drink?”

  They nodded. Across the room, Angelo and my parents were all on pay-as-you-go phones, each speaking quietly and urgently. Angelo’s face was especially tense, and he had lapsed into French, which meant that it was serious. My dad was speaking Italian across the room, and I heard “figlia mia” several times. My daughter.

  I poured water for both Jesse and Roux. “Are you in shock?” I asked them. “It’s okay if you are. It’s a lot, I know.”

  “Not in shock,” Roux said. “Just … okay, maybe in shock a little bit.”

  Jesse reached out and encircled my waist with his arm, then wrapped his other arm around me and buried his face against my neck. I pressed my cheek to the top of his head, smelling his shampoo, realizing just how badly things could have gone and shaking with gratitude that they hadn’t.

  “Hey,” Jesse whispered, low enough that neither my parents nor Roux could hear him.