“But when tedb said yes, I switched Red for a double. I was always going to bring the real Red back.”
Sam looks to Joanna for confirmation. She nods. “He went back to the Forties looking for you. Then he came to Brooklyn. He spent the night on his police scanners and calling all his shady underworld contacts. He even concocted a crazy story for Alex that you’d been stopped in the street by a casting director for some indie movie about homeless clog dancers.”
“Your story, if she asks, is that your one scene took all night to shoot and you were so convincing they expanded your role,” says Sam. “You’re Roxy, the one-legged clogger who isn’t letting her handicap stand in the way of her dream.”
I find myself laughing for the first time in what seems like a long time.
“We got out of Brooklyn Flea duties by telling Alex we’d both been cast,” says Joanna. “I’m K-Clog, the reigning champion who knows her time is up but wants one last shot at homeless clogging glory.”
Sam says, “I’m Buzz, the cynical con man who discovers Roxy clogging at the bus station and decides to do something good with his life.”
“I love this movie,” I say, because I do. I really want to see it. I take the hoodie from Sam and nod my thanks.
“Sorry it took so long to track you down,” he says. “I’m in the favor business. I don’t want anyone hating me.”
“Stop saying things like I’m in the favor business and they won’t,” I say.
Sam nods and gives me a tentative so we’re good? smile.
I put the hoodie on and start to struggle with the zipper. Sam goes to help me but Joanna elbows him out of the way.
“Move, doofus,” she says to him. Joanna has even more trouble getting the zipper to close than I did. As she tugs at it, she lowers her voice and says, “Sam’s not the worst person in the entire world.”
My recent acquaintanceship with Vanessa Dominion leads me to agree with that.
“He did me a favor,” she continues. “Alex didn’t want to take me in at first. She’d never admit it, but it’s true. Sam totally sold me to his mom. He made me sound like a shining angel from heaven. And it wasn’t because we’re such a close family. I know he did it so it would take the spotlight away from all the shady deals he does, but still . . .”
Joanna has this wistful little smile on her face. It’s unsettling.
“So you’re telling me he’s selfish and he has secret agendas?” I say.
“I’m telling you things worked out for me because of him,” she says, yanking at my zipper. “He’s a good person to have on your side.”
Ryan pushes Joanna away from the hoodie. He pulls the zipper up to my neck with one quick movement.
“I’m probably not a good person to have on your side,” he says. “But my girlfriend disappeared, I got hung on a hook in a meat locker, and my sister’s a spy on a secret mission. Something’s going on and I want in.”
“You don’t,” I tell him. “You really, really don’t.”
“I want in, too,” says Sam.
“I don’t want in at all,” says Joanna, scowling. “But it looks like that’s the only way I get to hang out with you.”
I am almost touched by Joanna’s lovely sentiment, except for the huge amount of resentment in her voice.
“So what’s the mission?” says Ryan, rubbing his hands and looking way too excited.
We leave the stench of dead animals and head to a half-empty diner on Mott Street, just north of Canal Street. I rip through a plate of buttered pineapple bun and eggs in under a second, such is my extreme hunger. I’m now attacking a fried fish ball and sausages. As I chew, swallow, and gurgle down a passion fruit green tea, I explain the situation to my three companions. I mean, at this stage, why not? Joanna and Sam know about the Forties. Sam saw the man in the Strike mask. Who am I protecting? I obviously do not reveal to Ryan that Blabby = Vanessa, but other than that small, trivial detail, I tell my brother, my friend, and Sam Gunnery that Strike and Irina are missing and that Edward Dominion’s lethally psychotic daughter plans on carrying out my biological mother’s final assassination. I conclude with the small but important detail that I do not, as yet, know the target of Vanessa’s bullets.
When my summation of my last twenty-four hours in New York is complete, I am met with three pairs of wide, staring eyes and three open mouths. Joanna’s phone vibrates, breaking the silence. She picks it up and gives me a warning glance.
“Hello, Nancy Wilder, mother of Bridget and Ryan,” she says. “Yes, they’re right here.”
Ryan looks stricken. “I lost my phone,” he mouths to me.
“I lost mine, too,” I mouth back.
“You know what, Nancy, they’d forget their heads if they weren’t screwed on.” Joanna is talking to my mom like they are old friends. I don’t know how she picked up these social skills but I’m not complaining. “Cut the kids a little slack,” she goes on, a friendly gurgling laugh giving her voice a melodic quality. “This town is a whirlwind, so much to do and see. Their feet haven’t touched the ground. Ryan’s been hanging out with us, him and his interesting girlfriend . . .”
I look over at Ryan, who stares down into his squid dish.
“They all stayed over last night and they’re still sound asleep. I’ll have them both call you when they surface. Okay, great talking to you, Nancy, my love to Jeff and Natalie. You take care now. Bye.”
“Wow,” I breathe. “You said more words to my mom in the past thirty seconds than you did in the last seven years, and none of those words were bitter or resentful. You sounded like you actually cared.”
“Neat trick,” Joanna says. “I learned from the best.” She inclines her head toward Sam, who is texting furiously on his phone.
Without looking up, he says, “Okay, I’m getting you both untraceable prepaid phones so that doesn’t happen again. I’m uploading surveillance footage from the time Bridget and Irina climbed out the window of the Forties. I’m looking for film from Chinatown at around the time Ryan emerged from the subway. What else can I do? How else can I help?”
Three pairs of wide, staring eyes—one of them mine—and three open mouths—again, one mine—are trained on Sam Gunnery.
“Sorry, who are you again?” says Ryan.
“He’s my cousin Sam,” says Joanna.
“He might not have cooties,” I say.
That cool, cocky, calculating quality I found so off-putting about Sam seems to have vanished. He owns that he did the wrong thing yesterday and he’s making a conscious effort to redress the balance. Of course, knowing what I know of him, he’s also doing it because I will now owe him a colossal favor.
“What happens if we get this footage?” says Ryan.
“When,” emphasizes Sam. “My most reliable guy’s on it.”
“The Squirrel,” I tell Ryan.
“Okay, what then?” says Ryan. “What’s the plan?”
I take a mouthful of fish ball, and between chews, I say, “I want to save Strike but he doesn’t need me. Yes, I left him in the direst situation imaginable, but that’s been the case his entire life. We could race all over the city looking for him, but he’ll find a way to survive. Vanessa’s a huge narcissist. She’ll keep Irina alive so she can say”—I adopt a cold, heartless British accent—“‘Look at me, Irina. Watch me take your crown. Look at me, daddy. . . .’” I wait for the table to burst into applause at my acting abilities. There is no clapping, so I press on. “So we have to find out what Irina’s last mission was and stop Vanessa from carrying it out.”
“Is that all?” says Ryan. “I was worried we wouldn’t have time to go to the Central Park Zoo.”
“You’re not stealing a reptile,” I warn him.
“I can maybe get a list of the most popular assassination targets,” says Sam.
“Where would you get that?” says Ryan, who seems a little bit irritated whenever Sam opens his mouth. I can’t say I don’t understand.
“Deep web,” says S
am.
“Right.” Ryan nods then looks at me and mouths, “Deep web?”
Sam’s fingers fly across his phone. As he texts, he says, “Did anyone—Edward, Irina, or Vanessa—say anything that would give you any kind of clue as to what this last job was about?”
All right, Bridget Wilder, so-called spy, do that thing where you retreat into your mind and play back every single event of the last day. Concentrate on the small details. The way Edward was sitting. The weapons Irina threw into her black bag. Vanessa’s face when she walked away from Irina’s body. Was there something I missed? An overheard conversation. A text I shouldn’t have seen. Anything?
Something bubbles to the surface. Something Vanessa said to me after she hit me with the fridge door. I was losing consciousness. Nothing made sense at that point. One minute she was talking in her precise, cut-glass English accent. The next she was speaking gibberish. She said something like . . .
“Oh-ley-ah. Na-ga-su. Moo-manay,” I say, tentatively sounding out the words I think I remember hearing her utter as I blacked out.
The other three give me baffled, slightly concerned looks.
“She invented a private language for us to communicate in, when we were like seven or eight,” Joanna tells Sam. “She was weird even then.” Joanna leans toward me. “Is that what you’re doing now? Speaking in a private spy language you just invented?”
“No.” I can’t believe she brought up the long-repressed memory of Bridgannese, the secret vocabulary that would have made us seem fascinating to other people if Joanna had bothered to learn even a few words from the Bridgannese dictionary I made for her.
“I remember that!” hoots Ryan. “She used to have . . . remember, you had that sign, Bridget’s Room: Keep Out, on your door, and then one day, it had changed to this insane mixture of symbols, numbers, and letters.”
“It would have made sense if you’d read the dictionary,” I say, reddening.
Joanna and Ryan are both laughing too loud and too long.
Sam grins at me. Great. What’s he have to say?
“I used to do things like that,” he says. “I remember when I was that age I drew a logo on my notebook. It said Gunnery City in big, bold writing. I didn’t even know what it meant but I liked the way it looked. I even got this kid who owed me a favor to get it printed on a T-shirt. Pretty soon, everyone in school wanted one.”
“So basically your story’s nothing like mine,” I say. “Except to let me know you’ve always been cool.”
“Well, you’re cool now,” Sam says.
Oh. That was nice. And unexpected.
“So that thing you were saying?” he goes on.
“That thing?” Right. The important mission. “This thing I think I remember Vanessa saying. I might be wrong, but it sounded like oh-ley-ah na-ga-su moo-manay.”
Sam holds his phone up to my face. There’s a microphone app on the screen. “Say it again, slow and clear.”
I repeat the words I may or may not have heard.
“Let’s see if there’s a translation that makes sense.”
Sam replays the recording of me saying “Oh-ley-ah na-ga-su moo-manay.” I cringe at the way I sound all shrill and breathless. It’s like when you accidentally see your reflection in a window when you’re not prepared. I look like that?
“That’s Trezekhastani,” says someone who’s approaching our table.
I hear the voice, but I’m still shuddering at the thought of my squeaky tone.
“It means ‘Say good-bye to the memories of your youth,’” says the voice as it gets closer to us.
I see Sam glance up. He seems momentarily surprised, and then he smiles. “The Squirrel knows everything,” he says.
“Not everything, apparently,” says the owner of the voice.
I’m not thinking about how squeaky I sound anymore. I’m thinking that I know who’s talking. I’m thinking that my heart is banging its way out of my chest. I look up to see someone I didn’t think I was going to see again.
Dale Tookey.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Secret Squirrel
“Hi,” I say, or rather squeak, as I gaze up at the boy standing a foot from our table holding a white plastic bag and confirm that, yes, this is Dale Tookey. Hacker for hire, double agent, someone I kissed twice and never heard from again: Dale Tookey is all those things. But what is he doing here?
“Hi,” says Dale Tookey. His voice also comes out a little higher than he probably wanted. He looks legitimately stunned to see me. Sam gets up, takes the plastic bag from Dale, reaches inside, and hands two prepaid phones to Ryan and me. Sam pulls an empty chair from a nearby table and motions for Dale to sit down.
“Hacker,” says Sam to the rest of us, by way of explanation. “He’s a superhero in his own universe, but around flesh-and-blood, non-digital life forms he gets a little squirrelly, hence the name.”
Dale doesn’t smile. He darts sidelong looks at me and swallows hard.
“You’re that guy,” Joanna suddenly says. “Bridget, he’s that guy. Your guy, you know, from that time . . .”
She beams at me and points at Dale like I don’t know who he is.
“Hold up,” says Sam, looking from Dale to me and back, his confusion evident. “You two know each other?”
“Of course they do,” Joanna trumpets. “They’re both spi . . .”
I see the small burst of panic on Dale’s face. Suddenly, I get it. He’s undercover.
I grab what’s left of my fried fish ball and ram it in Joanna’s mouth.
“Bwwiwww!” Joanna tries to shout.
Sam stares at me and then at Dale. I didn’t really help the situation there.
“You’re both . . . ?” Sam says.
“Spi . . . der . . . ,” I start.
“Lovers,” Dale completes.
“Spider lovers,” I say. “Lovers of spiders.”
“When did you ever love spiders?” says Ryan.
“Oh my God, you know nothing about me,” I snap. “Spiders are my passion. I spend all my free time on spider websites like . . . like . . .”
“The web dot com,” says Dale, giving me a that’s the best I could do shrug.
“That’s where we met,” I tell Sam. “I was a big fan of the . . . of the . . .”
“Green jumping spider from Australia,” says Dale. “And she wanted to know about the Goliath bird-eating spider indigenous to South America.”
“Yeah, I’m over that one,” I say. “I thought he was cool, but he’s a self-obsessed spider who doesn’t care about anyone else’s feelings.”
“You don’t know the Goliath as well as you think,” Dale says. “He likes hanging out with certain other breeds of spiders and he wishes he could do that all the time, but he’s got a whole other life it’s best you know nothing about. When you think he’s ignoring you, he’s actually protecting you.”
“If the Goliath spider knew anything about . . . the people who study him, he’d know we don’t need protecting, we just need a little acknowledgment that we exist.”
“The Goliath spider knows the people who study him exist,” says Dale.
“Well, if he knows, then . . .” I stop talking. He hasn’t forgotten me. He’s here doing a job. I need to respect that.
Joanna swallows the fish ball and glares at me. “Stop doing that. I could choke to death.”
“We’re talking about our mutual love of spiders,” I say to Joanna, staring straight into her eyes. “That’s how I know the Squirrel. That’s the only way I know him.”
Joanna nods and then, right in front of me, she mouths “It’s not” to Ryan.
Sam is focused on his phone. He looks up at Dale. “Okay, I got the files you sent. I know too much human interaction makes you break out in hives, so I’ll let you bounce out of here. I’ll text you if I need anything else.”
I don’t see Dale for months and now he’s going to disappear again? After two minutes. Just like that?
“Um
. . . can I talk to the Squirrel for a second?” I say. I stand up and head out of the diner. “It’s spider talk, you wouldn’t be interested. I’ll just be a minute.”
I motion for Dale to follow me. Sam, Joanna, and Ryan all watch us shuffle out of the diner.
We walk in silence past a fish stall. I turn to him. “Listen,” I say.
“Not here,” he says.
Dale picks up his pace. I follow him to the corner of Mott Street, where the traffic is at its busiest and loudest.
“In case anyone’s listening,” he says.
I nod.
“I didn’t know it was you,” he says. “I don’t ask questions. Sam wants something, I try to get it.”
“What are you doing here?” I say, attempting to make myself heard over the roar of cars, buses, and garbage trucks.
“What are you doing here?” he asks.
The Saturday morning traffic is so loud, I have to shift closer to Dale, close enough that I need to hold on to his arms for balance, so close I have to lean in and whisper in his ear. I tell him about Strike’s van, about the Forties, about Irina, and about Vanessa’s plan. I finish talking and stay in the same position, my mouth close to his ear, my hands on his arms.
I had to travel three thousand miles, get attacked by Tasers, menaced by bikers, hit by a door, and hung on a hook but I’ve got that feeling again. The I-hate-to-say-it-but-I’m-going-to-say-it squishy feeling I had the first time Dale Tookey smiled at me. The same feeling I had when . . .
“Did you say Trezekhastani?” I yell in his ear. He jumps in fright. I grip his upper arms.
He nods. “‘Say good-bye to the memories of your youth.’”
“Sam’s mom drove us from the airport. It took forever. She said it was because the kid of some high-up from the Trezekhastan government is having some sort of party.”
Dale checks his phone. “‘Nurik Tubaldina, Trezekhastan secretary of state, and his wife, Valla, American-raised daughter of Savlostavian parents, celebrate the passage into manhood of their son, Atom, at two o’clock in the Trezekhastan Orthodox Cathedral.’”
The dots start to connect. “Vanessa called herself a chameleon. She said she could change her look and her accent. Why would she learn Trezekhastani? What use would she have for it? Unless . . .”
Spy to the Rescue Page 13
