Code of Honor

by Alan Gratz

“Hold the door!” a woman called. I shrank back, but she stuck her hand in, catching the doors before they closed. She was one of the most beautiful women I’d ever seen. She was young, and fluid, and alive, even here in this cold, gray government building. Especially here. She could have been on television. She had light brown Middle Eastern skin, dark hair and dark eyes, and full lips. She was wearing a dark blue skirt and jacket over a form-fitting white shirt. If she’d passed me at the mall I would have stared.

  But I wasn’t at the mall. I was on the run, in the elevator of a secure government facility. I dropped my eyes to the mail cart, still panicking. Still trying desperately to think what to do.

  “Hello,” she said, turning her thousand-watt smile on me. I was so flustered I didn’t even say hello back.

  “You missed the mail room,” she added.

  I was usually cool around pretty girls at school, but this woman was so beautiful I could barely put two words together.

  “I—huh?”

  “It’s on sublevel four, isn’t it? Where the trucks come in?” she said.

  “What?” I said dumbly.

  “Sublevel four,” she said again. “The mail room. That’s where the big trucks come in from outside.”

  “Uh, yeah,” I said. Yeah! The mail room! Trucks! Outside access—probably without all the scanners and cameras and metal detectors! “Yeah!” I said.

  She smiled at me again. I felt like my own personal guardian angel was pointing me the right way. My own gorgeous guardian angel.

  “Oh, silly me—I forgot to push my button,” she said. She leaned over and pushed the button for sublevel 12. “Want me to push four for you?” she asked me.

  “Um, yeah,” I said. “Thanks.”

  We stood next to each other, me trying to ignore how pretty she was and failing miserably, her probably already having long forgotten I existed. She hummed a song while we waited, and distantly I recognized it as that old NSYNC song, “Bye Bye Bye.”

  The elevator dinged and I started to move my cart toward the door, but this was just sublevel 3. One more floor to go. The doors opened and a white guy in a suit started to step inside.

  “Rick!” the woman said. “Just the man I was coming to see.” She intercepted him, putting her arm in his and walking him back off the elevator. The doors closed on them, and I let out the breath I didn’t know I’d been holding.

  I silently thanked my guardian angel and punched the sublevel 4 button again, even though it was already lit. I had a second chance. Maybe there was some way I could say “Bye Bye Bye” to this place after all.

  I STEPPED OFF THE ELEVATOR, PUSHED THE MAIL cart through thick pieces of hanging plastic, and entered the building’s mail room. It was a huge facility with conveyor belts, wheeled canvas carts big enough to crawl inside, stacks of smaller plastic mail tubs, and huge sorting areas. At the back of the room were long concrete loading bays and garage doors where semis could back in. Miraculously, one of the bays was open. An unmarked trailer was parked backward in the stall, and the garage door at its head was wide open. I could see darkness outside. And freedom. I was giddy just thinking about how close I was. Just a little farther, and I would be outside and on my way to Darius.

  But first I had to get past the dogs.

  There were two of them. German shepherds, led around on leashes by two US soldiers in black fatigues with automatic rifles over their shoulders. The rest of the mail room was almost empty except for the two men in jumpsuits wheeling boxes off the truck on dollies. The soldiers walked in and out of the truck and around the boxes, their dogs sniffing everything.

  The truck I had to sneak past to get outside.

  One of the dogs raised its head and looked straight at me, and I hurriedly pushed my mail cart behind a sorting machine.

  I peeked out again, but the soldiers and mail room guys hadn’t seen me. The dogs knew I was there, but they were trained to sniff for explosives and toxins, I guessed, not to be watchdogs. But they’d be onto me the second I got anywhere close to that truck. And just when I was so close!

  I debated just leaving the gun where it was, but eventually I pulled it out from its hiding place under the envelopes. What was I carrying the thing around for if I wasn’t going to shoot at anybody with it? I sighed, knowing I still couldn’t do it. But I had to find some way around that truck.

  I watched the workers and the soldiers with the dogs, trying to look for some pattern to their movements, some opportunity for me to slip through. But this was no video game with NPCs who marched around on set routines so you could sneak up behind them and knock them out. These were real people. Real Americans, with jobs and families and lives. I had to get away, but I couldn’t hurt anybody doing it.

  There—on the wall. A fire extinguisher! Right beside where the workers were stacking the boxes, and the dogs were sniffing them. Adam and I had once watched a video on YouTube of some idiots shooting fire extinguishers. The red canisters erupted like geysers when they were shot, spraying a thick white cloud of carbon dioxide everywhere. Harmless, but really hard to see through the cloud. And they’d make a terrific distraction until these guys figured out what hit them.

  My hand trembled a little as I propped the gun on a conveyor belt that wasn’t running. I took aim very carefully. The fire extinguisher seemed a lot farther across the room than when I’d first come up with the idea, but I was sure I could do it. I shot stuff at this distance all the time in video games. I just had to wait until the four men were close enough to the fire extinguisher to be swallowed up by the cloud, but not so close that I would hit one of them if I missed. I waited, watching them move back and forth, my heart pounding in my chest, and then I saw my chance. I squared up my aim and pulled the trigger—

  NOTHING HAPPENED. THE TRIGGER DIDN’T BUDGE.

  I pulled the gun back and stared at it. Why didn’t it shoot? Wait—guns had safeties on them, didn’t they? So you couldn’t shoot yourself in the foot by accident when you were pulling your gun out of your holster. I searched the sides of the pistol, trying to figure out which of the switches and buttons was the safety. I felt way in over my head.

  I flicked a switch near my thumb to what I figured was “shoot” (or “un-safe” maybe?) and took aim again. I had to wait forever for everyone to be going the same direction again, but then at last I had another chance. I squinted down the short barrel of the gun, held my breath, and squeezed the trigger.

  The gun kicked like a line drive taking a bad hop, and I ducked reflexively, my ears ringing like crazy. The bang was so loud! Then the air was filled with yelling and barking. I peeked out from behind the machine. The fire extinguisher was still there—I’d missed it! And now the soldiers and workers thought somebody was shooting at them. They had all ducked behind boxes, the soldiers scanning the room with guns in hand.

  No! I’d ruined everything. I was going to be caught. Thrown back in my cell. Handcuffed. I had shot at United States soldiers! They would never believe me when I told them I was shooting for the fire extinguisher.

  The soldiers were yelling into walkie-talkies. In minutes, seconds, security would pour in through the hanging plastic, and I was done for. I had to make a run for it. But I couldn’t, not without being seen.

  I aimed at the fire extinguisher again. They were all still huddled around it, but at least this time they were hiding out of the way. I pulled the trigger, and the gun exploded again. Another miss. The soldiers ducked. I tried again. And again. And again. Nothing! Dang it! How hard was it to hit a fire extinguisher from across the room?

  The soldiers had figured out where I was from the gunshots. One of them was taking aim at me as I tried one last shot.

  THOOM!

  The fire extinguisher exploded, swallowing everything on that side of the room in a white cloud. Yes! I scrambled up from where I knelt, my arms sore and my whole body shaking. I sprinted along the side of the tractor trailer away from the yelling soldiers and barking dogs and into the cold night air. I was free
! I’d made it outside!

  I couldn’t stop running, though. Not until I was far enough away from the building to hide someplace. I ran up a long, wide concrete ramp to a big dark parking lot, slipping in the snow as I stopped to get my bearings.

  Snow? I shuddered in the freezing cold air. I’d forgotten it was mid-January. But this was definitely not Arizona. Or Nevada. Or New Mexico. Colorado maybe? Up in the mountains?

  I couldn’t stand around figuring it out. I ran in among the scattered cars in the parking lot and crouched down, trying to hide. I had to figure out which way to run before I really put my legs into it. I peeked up through the snow-covered car windows and my eyes fell on a giant white obelisk in the distance with two blinking red lights on the top. Dully, I realized what I was looking at.

  It was the Washington Monument.

  The gun slipped from my hand and clattered to the ground as I stood and stared.

  I wasn’t in Arizona, or Nevada, or California, or Colorado.

  I was in Washington, DC.

  WASHINGTON, DC.

  I knew things were serious. That this business with Darius was big-time. But not this big-time. Not fly-Kamran-Smith-to-Washington-and-detain-him-in-the-Department-of-Homeland-Security-Headquarters kind of serious.

  I realized I was standing in plain sight and dropped back down between the cars. I couldn’t see the Washington Monument anymore. Almost like it had been a dream.

  But it hadn’t been a dream. I was in Washington, DC. Something like two thousand miles away from home.

  I heard shouts from the ramp down to the mail room. I had to run. I would have to figure out how to get back home later.

  Two thousand miles?

  There were trees in the distance, beyond the parking lot. I grabbed the gun out of the slush and hurried toward the trees, still crouching low. I came to the end of a Volvo, looked both ways for guards, and sprinted across the open road to the next line of cars. Safe. I was almost to the end of a big white SUV when I heard a shout behind me and turned to look. I couldn’t see anything but cars, but that was a good thing—it meant they couldn’t see me, either. Just a few more rows, and then I would be to the woods.

  I turned to run again, and the burly African American soldier who’d come to my cell to transfer me stood in my way. I knew it was the same guy because there was dried blood caked around his nose where I’d hit him. And he looked seriously unhappy about it.

  In a daze, I remembered I still had the gun and raised it, my arm moving like I was underwater. Then the gun wasn’t in my hand anymore. It was in the soldier’s hand. He’d taken it from me in the blink of an eye. Somebody hit the fast-forward button and he punched me in the chest. Knocked the wind out of me. Spun me around. Caught me before I sank to my knees. Put me in a headlock, one arm around my neck, the other covering my gasping mouth.

  And just like that, it was all over. I was caught.

  MY SNEAKERS CUT PATHS THROUGH THE SLUSH IN the parking lot as the big soldier dragged me backward, away from the Homeland Security building. A white van screeched up behind us, and its side door flung open. Hands grabbed me, dragged me inside, and the door slid shut with a bang.

  “Go,” the soldier said, his voice deep and urgent.

  The van accelerated. It was dark inside, windowless, and it took me as long to catch my breath as it did for my eyes to adjust. I was on the floor of an empty cargo van. There were two seats at the front, only one of them occupied. The driver was a young white guy with sandy brown hair, wearing all black, but that’s all I could make out from my angle. The big soldier sat on a low metal bench welded to the van wall behind me, his huge black army boots by my head. Another man, tall but thin, sat in shadow on a bench on the other side of the van, facing me.

  “Well,” the shadowy man said, his voice instantly familiar. “I have to say you certainly made that a lot harder than it had to be.”

  “Mr. Hagan?” I said.

  It was. A passing streetlight lit up the inside of the van, illuminating his thin, stubbly face.

  I sat up. “Mr. Hagan? But what—how—why—?”

  “All very good questions,” Hagan said. “Have a seat and I’ll try to answer them all. We don’t have much time.”

  A phone rang, and Hagan pulled his out of his pocket and looked at the screen. He held up a finger. “I need to take this,” he said. He answered it and held it to his ear. “Hagan.” He waited. “Escaped, you say?” He feigned surprise and looked right at me. “Now, how did he do that?”

  I climbed up onto the bench beside the soldier as Hagan listened, and I purposefully slid a few inches away. My chest still throbbed from the big guy’s punch. I had been hit a lot in football games, but I’d never taken a shot as hard and painful as that man’s fist.

  “Did he, now,” Hagan said. “Did he, now? Incredible. And you think he had help? I see. Do you have a description of the vehicle? Yes, I see. Yes, of course. I was already headed in. I’m in the car as we speak. If I see the van, I’ll do what I can to detain it. Yes. All right.”

  Hagan hung up and put the phone back in his pocket. “It seems you’ve managed a daring escape, Kamran Smith. Far more daring than the more prosaic one I had already arranged for you.”

  “But you said—”

  Hagan put up a hand. “I always meant to break you out. The moment the higher-ups told me we were finished, that they had their one and only terrorist plot all taken care of, thank you very much, now get back to your cubicle, Mickey Hagan, I knew I had to do something. We had to do something. And that meant getting you away from there.”

  “So you believe me,” I said. “About Darius being in Arizona.” I felt a huge weight lift off my shoulders. I’d been so convinced I was alone. I’d been ready for it. Ready to go it solo, to sacrifice everything to help my brother if I had to. But to know I had at least one ally—and a smart, connected one at that—was a huge relief. “You believe me again,” I said.

  “No,” Hagan said. “I never stopped believing. But I couldn’t very well come into your cell and say, ‘Kamran, I’m sending in a friend of mine with all the right papers to transfer you to another facility, but he’s really breaking you out.’ You noted, of course, the camera in the corner.”

  I turned to look at the big soldier. Hagan had sent him to get me out? And I’d smacked him in the face with a metal tray. The soldier didn’t look at me. He was busy disassembling the gun I’d taken from him, and that he had taken back so easily.

  “They’d have heard me, seen me for sure if I’d tried to tell you,” Hagan went on. “I had to play it the other way, in fact. Convince you we were finished, so as to allay suspicion when you did escape. I’d be suspect number one in helping you escape, you see, close as we were. So I came to you and played the part of the insecure intelligence agent, the role I was born to play. I don’t mind playing the fool, but I hated to hurt you like that. I’m sorry, Kamran.”

  I shook my head. It didn’t matter. All was forgiven. I was in a van, speeding away from the building where I’d been held. Speeding toward Darius and Arizona.

  “So I went home to watch telly and sent Dane Redmond here in for you,” Hagan said, nodding at the big guy. “Dane’s an old friend of mine. His speciality is getting people in and out of dangerous places. He’s ex–Special Forces.”

  I knew what that meant. Special Forces soldiers were Green Berets—highly trained elite soldiers who specialized in unconventional warfare. You could drop a team of Green Berets behind enemy lines, and in a week the twelve of them would walk out again with the warlord they’d been sent in after, without anybody else ever knowing they were there. They were the best of the best.

  “I was only after a routine snatch and grab,” Hagan said, “but you made it anything but routine.”

  The young, sandy-haired driver laughed, a real, delighted laugh, like he enjoyed any kind of chaos. “First time I ever seen somebody get the drop on Dane!” he said, cackling. “Took his gun, too!”

  “Kamra
n, meet Jimmy Doran. Jimmy’s our tech guy,” Hagan said. The driver waved. “He’s the one who looped the video on your room when Dane went in. He’s also the person who unlocked that key-coded door for you in the stairwell.”

  “He—you—?” I stammered.

  Jimmy laughed again. “Wouldn’t have had a clue where you were until the system registered all those wrong tries. Mashing all the buttons was a particularly nice touch,” he said. “I killed the alarm you should have triggered and unlocked the door for you.”

  Dane ejected the bullet clip from the butt of his gun and frowned at it. “There’s six bullets missing,” he said. He turned his hard eyes on me. “You shoot somebody?”

  “Uh, no,” I said.

  “The only thing Kamran killed was one very stubborn fire extinguisher,” Hagan said with a grin.

  “Saw that on the security camera feed,” Jimmy said from the front seat. “Nice trick! I was about to kill the lights for you, but you did all right on your own.”

  “It took you six shots to hit one fire extinguisher?” Dane said.

  “I’ve never shot a gun before, all right?” I said.

  “Ooh—hang on, guys,” Jimmy said. “I gotta pick up this hitchhiker. She’s a real looker.”

  What? I looked at Hagan, trying to understand. We couldn’t stop for hitchhikers!

  Hagan’s eyes told me to wait. The van slid to a stop, and the gorgeous woman from the elevator climbed into the passenger seat.

  JIMMY FLOORED IT AGAIN, AND THE BEAUTIFUL woman turned and waved at me. Even here in the van, just the flash of her smile made me blush.

  “Aaliyah Sayid, counterterrorism expert and CIA consultant,” Hagan said. “I had her in the building, just in case. Good thing, too. When you went rogue we had to steer you to the mail room, and Aaliyah was gracious enough to drop the hint.”

  The late-night transfer, the key code in the stairwell, the hint in the elevator—my entire escape had been watched over, orchestrated even, by these three guardian angels. For all I knew, Dane had sent security on a wild goose chase after they found him, buying me more time. I never would have gotten out without their help. And here I thought I’d been so clever. So smart. I was an idiot. Without their help, I would have been caught a dozen times over.