The Spy Who Totally Had a Crush on Me

by Michael P. Spradlin

  My nerves started to titter a little bit. I put my ear to the door, but couldn’t hear anything. No sound or movement coming from anywhere. I cracked the door open. It led directly to a big open area. I could see the black van sitting there, parked in the middle of the space. Again, no sound or movement.

  I crossed the threshold into the warehouse space. A few low-voltage lights illuminated the interior, and I had a pretty clear view of everything. The van was just about the only thing in the whole place, aside from a few boxes piled up along one wall. At the back wall, I saw another big garage door and a regular door behind it. I wondered if they could have had another car or truck waiting and switched vehicles, driving out the back. We could have missed it somehow. But Brent felt he had been able to keep the van in sight for the whole time and it hadn’t stopped anywhere else.

  Maybe everyone was still inside the van, waiting for me to show up, and they would pop out and scare the bejabbers out of me. That was probably it. Ha! I don’t scare that easily. Well, okay, I sort of do. But this time I’d be ready.

  They couldn’t be hiding anywhere else in the warehouse, so I cautiously tiptoed over to the van. The front windows were tinted. No view of anything or anyone inside. The back door had no windows.

  With a deep breath I put my hand on the rear door handle and was about to open it when I felt a hand grasp my shoulder from behind. I screamed, jumped straight in the air, and spun around ready to fight.

  It was Mr. Kim.

  “Oh my god! You scared the daylights out of me. Don’t do that,” I said.

  Mr. Kim was not amused. Not amused at all. He stood there staring at me with a look of pure agitation on his face. In Mr. Kim’s case, this meant that his face looked like it usually did, expect for a slightly turned up lip that indicated he was mad at me again.

  “What do you think you’re doing, Rachel?” he asked.

  “Why are you always sneaking up on me?” I countered. I’d found the best tactic with Mr. Kim was to keep him off the subject. The subject was usually me about to do something stupid or dangerous.

  “I gave you explicit instructions—” he started.

  “I know, I know. But I had to go to the bathroom and I thought there might be one in here and I thought as long as I’m here I might as well check out the van, so don’t you want to see what’s inside?”

  Mr. Kim sighed. He bowed his head for a moment.

  “How did you get out of the van?” His voice sounded tired.

  “What?” Another good tactic with Mr. Kim is to feign ignorance or hearing loss.

  “The car. How did you get out of the car? Alex tells me you were able to override the lock on the van and escape. How did you do that?”

  “Do you realize we could be standing next to an entire van full of Mithrians, and here we are concerned with me and my need for a potty break?” I asked him.

  “I don’t think the van is full of Mithrians. They are long gone. They’ve escaped. Now answer my question,” he demanded.

  “What was the question again?” For some reason I didn’t want to get into the whole hand-lighting-up-again thing.

  “Rachel!”

  It was as close as Mr. Kim had ever come to raising his voice to me since I’d been at Blackthorn. I have to admit, it didn’t sound pleasant.

  “Okay! Geez. Don’t be so sensitive. My hand went all tingly again, like it had an electrical charge, and I pushed the button and the lock popped open. Like in Hawaii with the flashlight. That’s all I know.”

  “Are you sure? Are you hurt at all? Did you feel any kind of pain?” he asked.

  “No. Just a tingly sensation in my fingers, then a feeling like pressure on the palm of my hand, and then zap, up goes the lock.”

  Mr. Kim frowned. He thought a moment, then looked at me.

  “Well, we can discuss this later. And we will. I simply cannot have you behaving this way. You could have put all of our lives in danger.”

  He was about to say more, but he was interrupted by the sound of a helicopter overhead. It was landing in the street outside the warehouse. The tactical team had arrived.

  A few minutes later, a horde of FBI commandos came storming into the warehouse. Mr. Kim spoke to the team leader and several of the men approached the van. One of them took a device out of his pocket and began sweeping it back and forth over the van’s hood.

  “What are they doing?” I asked Mr. Kim.

  “Checking for explosives and booby traps,” he said. I felt my stomach sink. I hadn’t even thought about the possibility the van might be booby-trapped. I could have opened the door and gone kablooey. Whew.

  The team leader reported that the van was clear, and two of the agents approached the back and stood on either side of the doors, machine guns at the ready. The team leader stepped up to the van door and pulled it open.

  It was empty. What the heck? Then one of the team members hollered from over by the pile of boxes along the wall. The boxes were fake and attached to a sliding motorized panel. He flipped a switch and the panel swung out of the way, revealing a metal door built into the floor of the warehouse. Two other agents took up a defensive position on either side of it. One of them pulled it open, revealing an underground stairway. Three of the agents hustled down the stairway, guns at the ready. They were gone for several minutes. Finally, word came back on the radio: the stairway led to a tunnel that led to another warehouse about a quarter of a mile away. The tunnel and the other warehouse were empty.

  Mithras had escaped. Man, I hated that guy.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  Resignation

  SIMON WAS ONE STEP ahead of us again. He had a backup plan to his backup plan to the escape plan. I’m betting he planned on us finding out about Rinteau. But he didn’t care. Even if we found out and followed them this far, they’d still have a way to escape. Simon liked rubbing our noses in our failures. Mr. Kim did some checking through FBI headquarters, and it turned out that both of the warehouses were owned by the I.T. Harms Company. Of course it took Pilar about two seconds to figure out that I.T. Harms was an anagram for Mithras. Has it come up before how much I hate him?

  There was no way for us to track them any further. Brent explained he’d been able to follow the van because it was on a single road by the school, and it had still been in the coverage zone by the time he started tracking. He pulled up satellite footage, and we saw that about fifteen minutes after the van had pulled into the warehouse, eight black SUVs had left the other warehouse, all headed in different directions. They couldn’t be tracked like the single vehicle. Once they left the other warehouse, they could have gone in a million directions, and Brent wouldn’t even know which satellite to track them on. They could easily disappear. And it looked like they had.

  I couldn’t believe Rinteau had fooled me. Was he really part of Simon’s inner circle? Or was he just some street kid who Simon hired to infiltrate the school for money? If that was the case, where had he gone? That was what was bugging me. Rinteau could have known I’d followed him out of the school, I suppose, but I doubted it. I had been pretty careful. He had to have been tipped off somehow. And it led me back to our mole. Someone in our midst was giving our enemy information. It was bad enough that Mithras sent someone right into our kitchen. Now I was really mad.

  The trouble was figuring out who was giving us up. I was back to our original list of suspects. Only a handful of people knew what had happened this evening. Mr. Kim, the four of us, the FBI team, and Mr. Quinn, who had verified the fact that our Firehorn was a fake. Somehow, one of those people was tipping off Simon.

  I wasn’t going to worry about that now, though. I wanted to find Rinteau and get some payback. We needed to know anything and everything that Simon had told him about the Firehorn and where he was going. And how in the heck he had managed to pull this off. He was going to talk, all right. If we could find him. He was probably with Simon, but he was the only lead we had. Maybe if we could find out more about him, we’d find a tra
il we could follow.

  Mr. Kim wanted to stay with the team and see if they could find any other evidence in either of the warehouses. He ordered us back to Blackthorn, so we loaded up in the van and Alex started driving back.

  I was really steamed. Rinteau had made a fool of me—of all of us, really, except Alex, I guess. And Pilar and Brent. Okay, he’d made a big, giant fool out of me. I so wanted to find him.

  “Alex,” I started.

  “No,” he replied. Rather curtly, I might add. How did he even know what I was going to ask?

  “How did you even—”

  “The answer is no. It doesn’t matter what the question was going to be,” he said. Well la di da.

  “Listen, I have an idea,” I explained. “What if we track down that Booker gangsta from the mall? This whole thing with Rinteau started there. If we can find Booker, maybe we can find out something about Rinteau,” I said.

  “Did you just say gangsta?” Alex asked. “Oh dear.”

  Pilar instantly knew what I was after, though. “I don’t know, Rachel. That could be dangerous. He has a lot of guys with him and they have knives,” Pilar said. “And probably guns.”

  “Yeah, but maybe if we go looking for him, we can find him when we’re not outnumbered. We can corner him somewhere and have a little chat with him, find out what we can, and then get back on the road again. Easy as pie,” I said.

  “Yeah, right. Did you ever notice that nothing with you is easy as pie? It’s the polar opposite of easy as pie. More like concrete cake, or something. This is a bad idea and dangerous and we’re not going to do it.” Alex’s mind was made up.

  Time to try other avenues.

  “Brent, remember Rinteau said that Booker ran a gang called the Fourth Street Bully’s?” I asked.

  “Yes,” Brent answered.

  “Can you pull up a map of Fourth Street in Philly on the computer?”

  “Already have,” he smiled.

  “Is it far from here?” I asked, innocently.

  “About fifteen minutes away. But listen, you know on map sites how you pull up the map and then it tells you about hotels and restaurants and other attractions in the area?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Well when I pull up Fourth Street, it just says, ‘don’t go there,’” Brent said.

  Oh. “Well, I’m sure it can’t be that bad,” I replied.

  Brent nodded his head that yes, it could be that bad.

  “Okay, look, we’ll just stay in the van. We’ll cruise around a little bit and see if we spot Booker. If we do, we’ll figure out what do then. If we don’t see him, no harm done, and we head back to school,” I said.

  “And I said no.” Alex wasn’t willing to budge.

  I looked at Pilar. Time to bring in the heavy artillery.

  “Alex, it can’t really hurt to cruise through the neighborhood, can it? I mean, Rachel has a point, maybe we can find out something that will help us get the Firehorn back,” Pilar said.

  I almost wanted to dance. Go Pilar. Alex stared at her in utter disbelief.

  “You can’t be serious!” He was about to turn purple.

  “I most certainly can,” she shot back, and Alex immediately realized he’d just entered Pilar’s doghouse. “Listen, Alex, we’re supposed to be a team here. I think Rachel’s idea makes a lot of sense. We don’t need to do anything too dangerous. Besides, we might not even be able to find him. But we won’t know unless we try, and we don’t have any other leads. Are we going to let Simon get off that easy? We’re not going to even try the one and only lead we have? No matter how meager it might be? Wouldn’t Mr. Kim try everything, look everywhere?” Pilar was on a roll.

  “I don’t believe this. She’s worn you down. Stop the madness, Pilar.” Alex gripped the wheel so tight, I thought he might break the steering wheel.

  “Come on, Alex. Just a look, that’s all,” she said. Alex kept driving and stewing for a few minutes.

  “All right, we try to find this Booker kid. If he’s not around, we’re bugging out. Is that clear?” His tone this time said there was no room for argument.

  I had to bite back a who-made-you-the-boss-of-us reply. I didn’t want to tick him off and have him change his mind.

  Brent called out directions to Alex as he drove back into the city. Soon the neighborhoods began to change from normal big-city strip centers and retail stores to urban decay. We turned on to Fourth Street and it was like we had entered a war zone. Old Brownstone buildings lined the street on both sides. Many were missing doors, and what doors there were stood covered in graffiti. Trash covered the sidewalks. An abandoned car sat on the side of the street, missing its doors, tires, and seats. Rachel, I’ve a feeling you’re not in Beverly Hills anymore.

  There were people around. Small groups of young kids gathered on the street corners. Fires flickered in trash barrels, giving the street an eerie feeling as the shadows darted and danced on the building walls. We cruised down the street slowly, keeping a sharp eye out for Booker, but had no luck.

  “I don’t think we’re going to find him. Anyone who sees this van is going to think we’re either trying to score drugs or we’re the cops. I think we need to get out of here,” Alex said.

  No one answered as we kept our eyes peeled for Booker. We drove up the street until we reached a dead end and Alex turned the van around. I felt like this was our only chance to find out what had happened to Rinteau. If we didn’t find Booker, then Simon was going to get away clean and I just couldn’t stomach the thought of it.

  I asked Alex and Brent to trade spots, in case we did find Booker and needed to convince him to talk to us. Alex would be the one we needed for that. We drove back up the street and after cruising slowly for a few blocks I spotted someone I recognized. Not Booker, but one of the guys who had been with him at the mall the day we had gotten into the scrap. He was a tall kid wearing a dark coat and stocking cap. He crossed the street a ways in front of us under the glare of one of the few working streetlights, and I caught a glimpse of his face. He’d been in Booker’s posse for sure, and he was walking along the street like he had somewhere to be in a hurry. Bingo.

  Ever since the first time we’d run into Mithras in Washington, DC, a few months ago, I’d developed the habit of always carrying a small bit of cash with me. Since it seemed like we were always running off somewhere to foil villainy, it came in handy. Like now.

  I told Brent to slow down on the street beside the kid. I pulled a twenty-dollar bill out of my pocket and rolled down the window.

  “Hey, you,” I said, “wait a minute.”

  The kid stopped briefly, glanced at me, and kept walking. Brent drove along beside him slowly.

  “I said wait a minute.”

  “I don’t know you. You best be getting out of here ’fore you gets in trouble,” he said. He tried to sneer when he said it, but it didn’t come off too well. For some reason, he looked scared. I had a feeling it wasn’t because of us.

  “I’m looking for Booker,” I said.

  “I don’t know any Booker,” he answered.

  “Sure you do. And Mr. Hamilton here”—I waved the twenty-dollar bill at him—“thinks you know him too.”

  “What do you want, missy?” he asked. His natural aggressiveness was coming back. Something hit me then. Mr. Kim had a network of ex-students, cops, government agents. People he could call on when he needed something done. In Hawaii, we’d learned the hard way that Simon had his own network. A picture of Leikala’s face popped into my head. Followed by a vision of me kicking her hard in the head. Blankenship was a bad guy. Maybe the baddest. And bad guys use other bad guys to get things done. And usually, their own people are more scared of them than the cops or the good guys.

  “I want you to tell Booker that Mr. Blankenship has another job for him. He’s got ten minutes to meet me here or Mr. B is going to be very upset. Trust me, you don’t want that.” I reached through the window and handed him the money. He took it, but the look on
his face told me I’d scored a direct hit. His face was a mask of sheer terror.

  “Ten minutes. Tick tock,” I said.

  He didn’t say anything, just turned and ran down the street, disappearing into one of the buildings.

  “I hope you know what you’re doing,” Alex said from the front seat.

  “It’s the only thing that makes sense. You were right all along, Alex. It was a setup from the beginning. Simon wanted to get someone inside. I think he used Booker to make it all happen,” I said.

  Rachel Buchanan doesn’t like to be played. Someone was going to pay.

  Starting with Booker, who had just exited the building and was making his way up the street toward the van.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  You Won’t Like Me When I’m Angry

  BOOKER’S ARM WAS STILL in a sling. At the moment, he didn’t seem like the same kid I’d seen at the mall. There, he’d been arrogant and walked with purpose. Now, his shoulders slumped and he shuffled along like he’d rather be anywhere else than where he was. He walked toward the van, squinting to see who might be in it, but also furtively looking about like he was afraid someone might spot him.

  He was only a few feet away when Alex and I stepped out of the van. He stopped and his eyes went wide as he slowly recognized us.

  “You!” he backed up into the street.

  “Good to know you haven’t forgotten us,” I said.

  He tried running back to the safety of the building. He hadn’t gotten very far when Alex grabbed him by the collar. He reached into Booker’s pocket and removed his switchblade. Booker flailed at Alex with his good arm, but with his other arm in a sling, he was outmatched. Alex turned him around and hustled him back and through the side door of the van.

  He landed roughly in the middle seat. Alex jumped in the van beside him and slammed the door. This was the great thing about Alex. He had to be dragged into a plan kicking and screaming, but once he was in, he was all business. I took Alex’s seat in the front and turned to face Booker. He was trying to look tough, but not pulling it off. He was scared.