It would have been a brilliant plan if I had a better pitching arm, but unfortunately the Microcam landed wrong way up, so the screen on my handheld showed nothing but a dramatic close-up of some carpet fibers. But I did have sound.
I ducked back down beneath the desk just as I heard the footsteps getting closer. The muffled distant sounds I had overheard now resolved into two male voices, in the middle of an unhurried conversation. “ . . . so then the waiter leaves again and then she turns to me and she says, this is what she says, she says ‘I just don’t think I can see myself with a man with so little ambition.‘”
“She said that?”
“She said that. She was all, ‘What are they even paying you for, you just spend all day wandering around an empty building doing a job any low-rent minimum wage security guard could do?’”
“It’s a temporary assignment!”
“That’s what I told her. I was like, ‘Look, this isn’t going to be my life forever, this is a good job with steady pay and a lot of room for advancement—’”
“And the training program – you told her you’re in the training program? You told her you were the only person in the class to score 100 on the final exam for Advanced Interrogation Techniques? Tell her that.”
“I did. She just rolled her eyes. She didn’t believe me.”
“She didn’t believe you?”
“No. She got all patronizing, and then I started getting super defensive, so finally I just changed the subject. But it pissed me off. I feel like she just doesn’t respect my accomplishments at all.”
“This is why you don’t date people from work, Charlie, I told you. Everyone above Floor Twenty-Five thinks they’re so goddamn cool and we’re just schmucks who walk around holding guns and doing nothing.”
“Right? Like, whatever, I know I don’t have three degrees in Chrono-Engineering, but it’s not like she could do my job either. She won’t even kill a spider.”
“Look. I didn’t want to say anything before because you guys seemed super happy and whatever, and that’s great, but I feel like Zoey is walking all over you here. This is what I was telling you before. In the morning briefing. When Mars asked about the daily agent tracker reports and you had the answer and you didn’t raise your hand until I made you. Remember? You need to learn how to like assert yourself.”
“Ugh, I know. I know. I just get tired of getting shot down.”
“You know what this is? This is about you and your dad.”
“Don’t start with me, Mike.”
“No, this is about you and your dad, and how you feel like your dad never listened to you—”
“For the last time, I am not going to go see your therapist. . . Wait, hang on, that’s my Comm.” He paused for a second, as though listening through an earpiece.
“Yes, sir. Seventh floor executive wing. . . No, sir. . . Just a minute, sir, let me ask Mike, he was in there last.”
“Ask me what?” said Mike.
“They flagged something on the tracker reports he wants to show us. Is the Comm screen inside the Council Chamber still working or should we go back down to three?”
“No, it’s powered off, but it’s still connected.”
“Okay,” said Charlie into his Comm. “Mike says it’s still hooked up. Go ahead and send the report over. Just give us a second to turn it on.”
There was the sound of movement, and then their voices dimmed slightly.
“Yeah, no, we’re there now. Go ahead and send up the report.”
It was silent for a moment or so while Charlie and Mike switched on the console for the Comm screen, leaving me with a dilemma. On the one hand, I was safely concealed where I was and unlikely to be spotted unless somebody came all the way into the room looking for me. On the other hand, I was suddenly very interested in the “tracker reports,” which had now been mentioned twice, and wondered who this “Mars” person was, for whom they presumably worked.
The only smart thing to do was to stay exactly where I was.
So, obviously, I took off my shoes, picked up the Microcam, tiptoed into the hallway, checked to see that the coast was clear, then very, very slowly edged myself around the door leading down into the Council Chambers.
Charlie and Mike had their backs to me, fiddling with the projection screen. There was a brass hinge on the door about midway up, facing directly into the room. I set the Microcam on top of it, then scurried back behind the desk before I could be seen.
The front of the desk was a solid wall of mahogany (the thing took six people to move, Mom had discovered several years ago when they came in to replace her carpet) which mercifully shielded the light from my handheld screen from being visible out in the hallway. But it lit up the dark little cave beneath the desk like a lamp, and it showed me something I hadn’t seen before.
Leo and I used to come to the office with Mom all the time as kids, and we each had our own favorite hiding spots. His had been underneath a large potted ficus that sat in the corner (now gone) and mine had been under the desk. I spent years of my childhood curled up in this little cave, listening to my mother work, watching her feet tap impatiently as she waited for reports to come in and popping my head out in the middle of meetings to startle visitors.
I had spent hundreds, maybe thousands, of hours over the years sitting in this exact spot – which was why it took me a moment to realize that on the roof of the little cave, on the direct underside of the surface of the desk, were two etched words that I had never seen there before.
“YOURS BACKWARDS.”
I stared at them for a long time, running my finger over the letters. They had been hacked into the wood, edges rough and messy, as though done in a hurry. I hadn’t been underneath this desk in at least a decade, but it had sat all that time right here in my mother’s office, untouched by anyone but her and locked securely in her absence. Either whoever had cleaned out her office and taken away everyone’s equipment had decided to engage in a very specific form of vandalism . . .
Or my mother had left me a message.
Yours backwards. What the hell did that mean? S-R-U-O-Y? Was that supposed to mean something? The babble of voices in the Council Chambers became soothing white noise as I leaned my head back against the dark wood and tried to think like Katherine Bellows.
My mother wasn’t a cryptic person – on the contrary, she was irritatingly blunt – so if she had left a coded message it was for a reason. I thought hard. Why would this place, underneath her desk, be the place she left the clue?
Because she foresaw this exact scenario, I realized. Because she knew if I were on-the-run inside this building, this is the place I would go to hide. She knew it even before I knew it.
The Comm screen came to life just then, perfectly visible through the Microcam on my handheld screen, and a row of three faces lined up side-by-side flashed onto the screen.
My father, my mother, and me.
Two of the faces were slightly dimmed, framed in black, calmly labeled “TRACKER DEACTIVATED. NO AGENT ACTIVITY.” But the face belonging to one Apprentice Agent Regina Bellows was brightly illuminated, framed in blinking red, with huge red block letters beneath it:
“SIGNAL DETECTED.”
In a surprising moment of solidarity, Charlie and I had the same thought at the same time.
“Shit.”
Charlie tapped his earpiece, “We’re looking at it now, sir. I’m sorry, I don’t understand how – Wait, inside the building?”
Mike turned to him, startled. “She’s in the building?” Mike whispered.
“He says that’s what the report says,” Charlie whispered back, then went back to his call. “Yes sir, sorry sir. We’re here. No, I was just telling Mike. . . Yes sir, right away. We’re on Seven now, it’s clear. How close can you narrow down the signal?” He turned back to Mike. “He says somewhere between floors 5 and 9.”
“Put him on speaker,” said Mike, who was doing something with the console. I heard another male voice p
op in, midsentence out of nowhere.
“ . . . teams blocking the stairwells, so that shouldn’t be a problem, and we already have teams in the lobby if she tries to come down through the central elevators.”
“He should run a geofilter,” said Charlie, almost to himself. Mike elbowed him, pointing at the headset, and mouthed, “Tell him.” Charlie shook his head. Mike sighed.
“Sir, you’re on speaker, this is Mike. If you run the tracker’s signal through a Class C-12 geofilter, you should be able to narrow down the location to within a fifty foot radius. It only takes about seven minutes.”
“Good thinking,” said the voice on the other end approvingly. “We’ll do that right away. In the meantime, stay where you are, sweep Seven again starting with the transport lab, and we’ll page you back when we have geofiltered coordinates.”
“Yes, sir,” they both said.
“No stone unturned,” said the voice sternly. “I do not want to report back to Mars and Saturn that we had her and she got away.”
“She won’t, sir,” said Mike. “She’s got no way out of the building.”
“See that she doesn’t,” said the voice. “We’ve already lost the mother. Mars wants this one alive.”
My heart stopped. What did he mean, lost her?
I swallowed hard, gritted my teeth and pushed the rising swell of fear down, out of my chest, as Mike and Charlie switched off the Comm screen and came back out into the hall.
“That,” said Mike, as they walked back towards the transport lab. “Right there. With the geofilter. This is exactly what I was talking about.”
“Drop it, Mike.”
“I’m telling you. I blame your dad.”
The second they had turned down the hallway, I dashed out to retrieve my Microcam, dizzy with panic. There were fingerprints and footprints in the transport lab. The thick dust would rat me out. If they went into the bathroom they’d still see wet counters.
In seven minutes they would trace my tracker to the desk, realize I had dug it out, and then the whole floor would be crawling with armed guards, hunting me down to deliver to two shadowy enemies with stupid planetary code names.
And Mike was right. Even if I’d had home coordinates, the transport lab was now useless to me, and it was clear that the guards with guns blocking the front door were on the side of whoever was hunting for me.
It was a dead end.
I stood in the hallway for a long moment, leaned my head back against the wall behind me, shooting death glares at the Council Chamber, and sighed.
It wasn’t until my head hit the wall with a hollow thunk that I remembered that that wall wasn’t a wall. It was a door.
And then it clicked.
My mother had left me – and only me – a way out of the building.
I ran back to her office, grabbed my bag, carefully replaced the chair so the desk looked undisturbed and, without a sound, eased open the door next to hers.
Mike and Charlie had come up through the central elevator bay from the lobby, which their boss had told them was guarded. So were the stairwells.
Nobody had mentioned the private executive elevator.
The elevator was installed by the Bureau with the express purpose of giving department directors and visiting VIPs an elegant and high-security entrance of their own so they could avoid the main lobby’s annoying retinal scans.
The elevator’s most prized feature was that it was not hackable, because its controls weren’t networked to anything else.
“The elevator itself is the computer,” I heard my mother’s voice say. At the time, I had thought it to be a clever security measure. Now, however, it was the thing that was going to save my life. Because it meant I had a foolproof way out of the building that nobody else could track.
If I could get it to let me in.
I placed my thumb gingerly on the small black screen in the elevator door. This was step one. If it recognized my vital signs from the Bureau database, it would open. I waited for what felt like an eternity before the screen flashed green and the doors slid noiselessly apart. I had cleared the first hurdle. I was in.
Inside the elevator, I placed my hand on a flat metal panel and waited, as the doors whooshed closed behind me. The Bureau didn’t want to force members of Congress or visiting dignitaries to undergo invasive personal scans, so the elevator’s primary security was in the password system.
But there were only a small group of people permitted to operate the elevator, all of whose genetic information was stored inside the database. The question was, how sophisticated was the scan? Would it read my vitals, identify me as Regina Bellows, and refuse to budge because I didn’t have security clearance? Or was half my mother’s DNA enough to confuse it?
The screen above the metal scan panel cycled through its roster of faces one after the other. When it got to my mother’s face it stopped. Then the screen went dark. My heart sank. Then it flashed back on again and scanned again. The same thing happened. After the fifth cycle, it paused on my mother’s face, blinked in and out several times, then flashed a message on the screen.
“SCAN COULD NOT COMPLETE. PLEASE CONFIRM IDENTITY WITH PASSWORD.”
Yours backwards, I thought to myself, unable to resist grinning as I punched in the security code. I had set her password for her that day, as she took me in this elevator up to the transport lab, and because I was annoyed at her, I had picked something she would hate being forced to type twice a day, every day, for two weeks until it was time to reset it again. Yours backwards. She had set the password before she left and left me a clue in case I needed it.
I typed five characters in a row.
$-1-n-e-P.
Or, reversed, the way I had made her enter it all those weeks ago: P-e-n-1-$.
(Don’t ever let anyone tell you that purposely annoying your parents serves no purpose.)
“PASSWORD RESET REQUIRED,” said the screen. She had been gone long enough that it was past time to reset her password, but the computer had recognized it.
I typed in a new password – “0-P-a-l-*”, so I’d remember it in case I needed it again – and hit CONFIRM. With a silent whoosh, the elevator started down, and I let out a sigh of relief so deep that I felt my whole body go shaky.
I was free.
I had no idea where Carter was, nor what had happened to my mom. I had nowhere to go, and only about six minutes until the entire block was crawling with armed guards hunting for me, but I was no longer trapped inside that ghost town of a building.
I stepped gingerly out of the elevator into the small foyer that led to the VIP parking garage. It was silent and still and empty.
Correction. It was nearly empty.
If nobody inside the building had a password for the elevator, then nobody should be parked in the executive garage. So then whose lone black car with tinted windows and no license plates was that, sitting quietly on the far end of the lot?
Suddenly, as if it could feel me looking at it, the car came alive. The headlights switched on and the engine turned over. Someone was inside it. Someone who wasn’t supposed to be here.
I ran.
The car gave chase as I sprinted as hard as I could, the wound on my arm tearing open again as I made a mad dash across the garage to the emergency exit that led to the sidewalk outside. It was wired with an alarm, so I was screwed either way, but at least it gave me a fighting chance.
I cut through the center of the lot, leaping over the low concrete dividers between rows, as the car behind me made an abrupt turn, tires squealing, as it wheeled around and barreled through the garage in the wrong direction to cut me off at the pass.
Oh please oh please, I thought. I was so close. I could see the door.
It. Was. Right. There.
I was no more than twenty feet away.
And then it was blocked from sight as the black car screeched to a halt right in front of me and the window on the passenger side rolled down. I spun away, one foot raised, arms rea
dy to pump, already leaning into a sprint in a new direction, when I was stopped short by a voice I had wondered if I’d ever hear again.
“For Christ’s sake, get in,” said my brother Leo.
Seventeen
Bailey’s Crossroads
I stood motionless, staring at him, seeing him, yet not quite believing it.
“Get in the car,” he said again, this time through clenched teeth, voice rising. “The building’s about to go into lockdown and in sixty seconds these garage doors seal. Reggie, get in.”
I got in.
“On the floor,” he said by way of greeting. “Can’t let anyone see you.”
Still too astonished to even form words, I obediently curled up as tiny as I could on the floor of the car, and Leo tossed a dark coat at me to cover myself with.
“Not a sound,” he hissed as the car pulled away. I breathed as quietly as I could, buried under Leo’s good winter coat. It smelled like pine and rosemary and home, and I felt absurdly comforted by it.
He wheeled the car around and headed for what I assumed was the VIP exit. Sure enough, he soon slowed to a standstill and there was the telltale beeping of the keypad on the parking garage’s security door.
“You can’t get into the building from here without a password or proper clearance,” he said without turning around, as the security door opened and he pulled out into the street, “so they’ve long since stopped caring about security in and around the garages. They’re useless to anyone who might try to use them as a way to break inside.”
“Though,” he continued, chuckling as he drove, the sound remarkably dry, humorless and ultimately more terrifying than outright screaming would have been, “as it turns out, they’re fairly handy if you’re trying to break someone out.”
A moment of silence, then, “Now stay down, don’t move, don’t breathe. We’re about to drive past the front door and the guards are going to stop us. The patrol out front just got paged on their Comms and moved to defensive positions two minutes ago. They know you’re here, but they’re only watching the front door. Nobody knows about the other elevator. Don’t make a sound or we’re both dead.”
The Rewind Files Page 25
