Undercover with the Hottie (Investigating the Hottie)

by Alexander, Juli

  Stepping out of the subway tunnel reminded me of walking on the roof with the wind threatening to blow me away. The day was cold, but bright and clear. Seeing sights that I'd only seen on television and movies proved more exciting than I predicted. I wouldn't have minded spending the day enjoying ourselves, but I had to keep in mind the odd coincidence of Ethan, an eighteen-year-old guy, wanting to write wishes on confetti at the very place we were concerned about the Secretary-General being on Tuesday night.

  The digital billboards were dizzying in person. I couldn't imagine the impact at night.

  “Come on, we need to go to the Visitor's Center first,” Leah said. “We'll probably have to stand in line.”

  We stood in line forever. None of us minded though because we were having too much fun hanging out. Plus, Daphne was ridiculously easy to embarrass.

  “Oh, hey,” West said. “They've got free wifi.”

  “No way,” I said. “That's crazy.” Did they plan to disable it during the New Year's Eve celebration? Should they?

  West refused to call Daphne Scooby Snack, and he wouldn't let the other guys call her that either.

  “Aww,” Leah said, watching West give Daphne a peck on the cheek. “You're like a cute little snack pack together like that.”

  Will and Logan turned to each other and said, “Snack pack!” Then they hooted in their ritual guy speak and high fived.

  “No,” Daphne said, sounding almost panicked. “Please.”

  “I move that the couple formerly known as West and Daphne hereafter be called Snack Pack!” Ethan shouted.

  “Aye,” everybody else said.

  “Motion passes,” he said.

  “I need a smoke.” West pulled a pack of cigarettes out of his jacket pocket.

  “Fine,” Daphne said, “but I'm not kissing an ashtray.”

  “Come on, Daphne,” he groaned.

  “Not negotiable,” she said, poking him in the chest with her finger.

  He swore and put the pack back in his pocket.

  In the next ten minutes, we managed to call them by their new nickname over a hundred times.

  When we got inside the Embassy Theater building, we watched a five-minute news reel about the history of Times Square. The Embassy Theater was the first news reel theater when it started the trend in 1929.

  Ethan didn't act at all suspicious while we were inside. He wrote his wish on the confetti like the rest of us. When it was my turn, I wanted to write something to help us succeed in our mission. I couldn't choose something obvious. Finally, I wrote, “To succeed.”

  Daphne wrote, “For anybody who calls me Scooby snack or the snack pack to catch mono.”

  “Um, Daphne,” Will said. “That's not really a wish. It's more of a curse.”

  “How is it a curse when you each control the outcome?”

  I didn't particularly want to cross that girl.

  “What did you write, Sidney?” I asked.

  She blushed. “I don't want to tell. If you tell, it won't come true, right?”

  “Maybe,” I said. I figured she'd been embarrassed enough for one day.

  Leah said, “I wished for world peace.”

  I thought it was sweet, but Daphne, West, and April all groaned.

  “Okay, Miss America,” Ethan said.

  “What did you write then?” I asked, sounding as irked as I felt. “What was so important that you came all the way down here to write it on the wall?” Oh, crud. I wasn't supposed to confront him.

  Sidney jumped in and said, “Yeah, smarty pants. What was your brilliant wish?”

  I sent subliminal thanks to her.

  “Why is everybody jumping on me?” he asked. “I wasn't the only one who thought it was lame.”

  “I thought it was a beautiful sentiment,” Sidney said.

  “So seriously,” Will said. “What did everybody else write?”

  “Mine is private,” Ethan said.

  “What about you, Will?” Logan asked.

  “I wished for next year to be as exceptional as this one.” He looked at me as he said it.

  Aww. Warmth spread through my chest.

  I wanted to throw my arms around him, but I managed to control myself.

  We had to move away from the wall to let others contribute. I stepped back from the others and looked at the wall for a few seconds, making sure to get a view of every piece of the colorful scraps of paper. Later, we could blow up the photo from my contact lens and search for Ethan's wish. Of course, I scowled. We could do better if we had a sample of his writing. I needed to make that happen.

  “Can we eat yet?” April asked. “I'm starving!”

  “Yes,” Logan said. “Let's eat. Then we can walk around and check everything out.”

  During lunch, Will brought up guitar, and next thing we knew, we were hitting shop after shop on Music Row. We checked out the Fossil store next. Then, we hit the Levi's store, where two of the guys picked up some jeans. We hit a cheesy souvenir shop and the Hello Kitty store. The scent of chocolate in the Hershey store almost knocked me over. Yum.

  “I want to live here,” Sidney said, while we drank the most amazing hot chocolate. “I bet you'd be happy all the time breathing in all this chocolate.”

  Then I bought a treat for Grandma, Nic, and Christie. I wasn't above buying their forgiveness.

  “I'm going to buy some of this hot chocolate for the loft,” Will said as he went over to the corner.

  I hadn't seen Ethan doing anything strange, other than buying something at the Hello Kitty store, but it turned out he had a little sister.

  We finally stumbled back down to the subway and headed home. When we got to the loft, we all had red faces from the cold and the wind. I had managed to lose one of my gloves, but I hadn't let anybody know. I kept my hand in my pocket most of the way home. I didn't want to be the target of their teasing.

  “Can you guys hang out? Or do you have to go home?” Logan asked as Will and I went to the door of our loft.

  “We'll check,” Will said.

  “We'll probably be over in an hour or so,” I said.

  When we walked through the door, I expected to see Nic and Christie, but Grandma was sitting alone at the kitchen table.

  “Hey,” I said.

  Will went around and kissed her on the cheek. “I don't know if we learned anything, but we had a good time.” He held up his Hershey bag. “And we brought you hot chocolate.”

  She wasn't reacting to anything that Will said. “Grandma?”

  She finally spoke. “Please sit down.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  The bottom dropped out of my stomach as we scrambled to sit. Had someone been shot? Or killed?

  “Grandma, what happened?” Will asked, his hands fisted on the table.

  “Your primary mission is no longer to watch the neighbors. We have a team working to monitor their safety. You have a new priority. Something went wrong this afternoon. Christie is missing.”

  Christie. My stomach knotted into a ball and squeezed and squeezed.

  “Nic waited in the car down the street while Christie went inside to tag the suspects phone. She was going to observe him after, if there was time. We don't know where she is. She disappeared. There wasn't a trace. She had tracking on her phone as well as a subcutaneous device.”

  “Subcutaneous? You mean it's planted under her skin?” Will asked.

  “Yes. Nic has one as well. Christie's is no longer transmitting.”

  “We don't know where she is? Does somebody have her?” How could this be happening?

  “Where's Nic?” Will asked.

  “He's at our New York Headquarters trying to make some headway. We know that she removed her contact lens almost as soon as she went into the gym. She apparently had something in her eye. We have video all the way to the sink in the locker room, and then we go dark.”

  “Well it had to be the guy, right? Mr. Smith? He must have spotted her.”

  “We don't know. It's
been six hours.”

  “What does that mean? Should they have contacted us? Would they? Would there be a ransom note?” I practically vomited my questions.

  “Amanda, I can tell you what the standard operating procedures are. Normally, if an agent is taken, the agent will refuse to acknowledge their connection with GASI. GASI will also disavow the agent unless there is something to be gained by negotiating. However, in this case, Christie most likely was not discovered to be doing anything embarrassing to the US. She wasn't caught at UN Headquarters which could have been a problem if Mr. Smith had gone to the office rather than the gym. Nic is optimistic that Christie can talk her way out of any number of difficult situations with ease.” She reached out and covered my hand with hers. “Your aunt is well trained. She has won numerous medals and commendations. She is equipped with everything she needs to extricate herself. Meanwhile, there are dozens of agents working on locating her.”

  “How could this happen? Why now? Oh my God has this happened before? Has she been abducted and tortured? Is that what's happening now?” I started to hyperventilate.

  “Amanda, dear. You need to relax. I don't think we have any paper bags here, so my only option will be to slap you.”

  I quit breathing mid-inhale. Then I gulped in a breath, let out a peal of hysterical laughter, and started to cry.

  Will put his arm around me, and I let him, but I stared straight ahead at Grandma.

  “Do we need to stop? Do you need a minute?” she asked.

  I shook my head.

  “You want me to continue?”

  I nodded. I needed her to keep talking because if I had time to fall apart, I would.

  “Now, we don't know if that Ethan had anything to do with Christie's disappearance, but we can't rule it out. We got your transmissions of the Wishing Wall. We've tried to work with the photo of the wall to find his 'wish,' and we haven't had any luck. However, I can get better resolution from the storage unit in your phone than from the images that were transmitted. Go ahead and plug it up to my laptop.” She handed me her laptop and the cord.

  I plugged the phone in and imported the photos. We'd ended up with ten.

  “Blow it up to 1000 percent. Will, bring the printer over here and plug it up.”

  Will did, and then I printed. The GASI app printed the page across ten sheets of paper which made it much larger and easier to see.

  “Wow,” Will said, spreading them out on the table in the proper order. “There are seriously a lot of pieces of confetti on that wall.”

  “Do you know where he was standing when he pinned his up?” Grandma asked.

  “Somewhere in the top half. I think if you divide the board into five sections across, it would have to be in one of the middle three sections. And he had a green piece of confetti,” I said.

  “Right,” Will said. “He was standing next to me. I don't remember him reaching overhead, so maybe start about here at the highest.”

  Grandma handed us each a marker. “We'll each take part of this area and comb through it. Do we have any idea what his handwriting might look like?”

  I hadn't managed to get a sample.

  Will pulled a scrap of paper out of his pocket. “I had him write down some specs on a couple of amps for me. It's a lot of numbers, but there are some words to compare.”

  I looked at the scrap of paper.

  “You did great, Will,” I said. “I was trying to figure out a way to get a sample of his handwriting, but I couldn't come up with a way to do it.”

  He smiled at me for a minute.

  “Let's run that through the copier, so we'll each have one. Take a picture with your phone and text it to our analysts. Then we can get down to business.”

  “Are you sure this is important?” I asked. “Can't we do something to help Christie?”

  Grandma looked me in the eye and said, “This is how we are helping Christie.”

  Will found the wish first. “Guys, I have it, but I don't think Ethan has anything to do with the assassination plot.”

  “Why not?” I asked, leaning over to see what he'd found. “What did he write?”

  Will sighed. “He wrote, 'Please let my parents and my friends accept me for who I really am.'”

  Oh... I did not see that coming.

  “Poor kid,” Grandma said. “He must be having a hard time.”

  “I think he's going to tell his parents he's gay,” I said.

  “Probably,” Will said, nodding. “But it could refer to other things.”

  Grandma shook her head. “Whatever it is he is struggling with, he's not involved. There goes that lead.”

  “I feel kind of bad for snooping,” I admitted.

  “We didn't have a choice,” Will said. “And we won't tell anybody.”

  I was freaking out about telling my parents I was a spy. I hadn't been thinking about anyone's problems but mine. I hoped Ethan's parents took it okay. I sent my wish tumbling out into the universe with Ethan's.

  Thirty minutes later, Nic Skyped in. “Hey, guys.” He looked weary as he shoved his hand through his hair. “So far the off-site meetings of those leaders we talked about earlier appear to be innocent and unrelated to our case. As for Christie, we've run heat scans on the gym building. We haven't found her. It is unlikely that she's in the building at this point, and we will be sending in a team to search every nook and cranny. We'd like to try something first.” His eyes darted to Grandma. “I haven't discussed this with Brenda yet. A couple of the analysts have suggested we send Will and Amanda to the gym.”

  “Nicholas!” Grandma exclaimed. “You cannot be serious!”

  “I know, Brenda. Let me lay it out. If there is no danger in the gym, they can go in and look for clues that might lead us to her. If there is danger in the gym and we have Will and Amanda adequately protected, we might provoke the enemy to poor judgment.”

  Grandma put her hands on her hips, and I thought Nic was lucky he was far away from her wrath.

  “Now, listen here, Nic. You are talking about using these children as bait, and no amount of carefully chosen words is going to change that fact. We are not using Will and Amanda as bait!”

  “Do you think it would work?” Will asked. “Could you really keep us safe?”

  “No, Will,” Grandma commanded.

  “We don't have any leads,” I said. “Nothing at all to go on. She could be anywhere right now. Anywhere.”

  “Brenda, we wouldn't take any chances with them. We'd have extra teams in the area. We'd fit them with full monitoring, heart-rate, real time audio, the works. We could send two agents in as parents, but they would significantly decrease our chances of success. The analysts only give a twenty-three percent chance of successfully extracting any information with a team of four.”

  “We'll do it,” Will and I both said at the same time.

  Next thing I knew, the three of us were in a cab to the Upper East Side. We met up with Nic and a team from GASI in an empty office space between a podiatrist and a dentist. They gave us guest passes to the gym, wired us for sound, planted devices in our running shoes, and went over the plan.

  I followed Will into the gym and tried to regulate my breathing. The day didn't seem real. At this point, I was past miserable, past tired, beyond panicking. There was a zone where I had nothing left to lose. I would do whatever it took to get my aunt back. I would do it well, and nobody would stand in my way.

  We reached the counter and whipped out our passes. The tan, white toothed guy behind the counter motioned for us to sign in on the second clipboard. We signed in as Will and Amanda Parker. Then we headed to the dressing rooms. I didn't want to separate, but we had earbuds and could keep in contact. GASI agents, including Nic and Grandma, were monitoring our every move.

  I pushed through the door to the Women's locker room. Was this where it happened to Christie? Was this where she disappeared? I went to the sink where she'd taken out her contact lens. Had she gone from here to the men's locker room withou
t the lens? Had she located Smith's phone and gym bag?

  If she'd struggled here, she would have tried to signal us in some way. Could somebody have sneaked up and disabled her before she had a chance to fight? I didn't think so. Even with one finger in her eye and bent over the sink.

  There was no way to search this area without being obvious about it. I had backup in case anybody had eyes on me in the locker room. I pulled the mag lite out of my gym bag and went over the sink and counter carefully. Nothing of interest. No blood. Some hair but it was the wrong color and probably belonged to someone who had stood over the sink to brush their hair. I wanted to find that contact lens. For all I knew, she had it in her pocket, but I wanted the reassurance of finding some tiny part of her. And there was a chance that she had recorded something more.

  I lay on the floor, shining the light up under the counter and over the floor. Nothing. A bottle of blue ammonia sat at the end of the counter. Could someone already have wiped it down in here?

  I went over to the small trash can and pulled it from the wall. I up-ended it on the counter, sending paper towels scattering. An empty water bottle rolled across the counter. The only other thing in there besides discarded paper towels was half a bagel and an empty can of spray deodorant. I set the can right side up on the counter and prepared to sort through the paper towels. That's when I saw it. The lens was stuck to the outside of the can, positioned about an inch down from the rim and nearly centered. The lens was looking right at me.

  “Nic,” I said into the empty room. “I found her contact lens. It was positioned to see whatever went down if it went down in here. Is there any chance that we could retrieve images from it?”

  “Amanda, the lens would stop transmitting once it was more than twenty feet from the support hardware.” Nic's voice had regained its missing energy. “If it truly isn't damaged, we should be able to reprogram it to send to another support pack and retrieve everything it photographed.”

  “So should I grab this and go?”

  “Yes, get the lens and put it on your tongue. Whatever you do, don't swallow it. Pull out your phone and hold it like you're reading a text. Will, hold yours to your ear. Bring your gym bags and walk back out. Will, tell the imaginary person on the phone that you are both on your way as you pass the desk. Make it look like you just got an emergency call, and you are needed home immediately.”