Prettyboy Must Die

by Kimberly Reid

  “You know he isn’t dead, right?” I ask, closing my fingers around the handle of the Phillips-head inside my sleeve, waiting for the moment I can use it.

  “For now. Your people have been embarrassed by Marchuk. I doubt they’ll let that happen again. They’ll either kill him by accident, or at the very least, make sure he never escapes again. Vadim and I will take over permanently, as it should have been before you destroyed everything. Or tried to. Today will make everything right again. You showing up was just a bonus.”

  “You lured me here!”

  “I didn’t know what you looked like. It was Marchuk who saw you in the student directory. He wanted to kill you. I wanted to ruin you. And Vadim wanted to use you as CIA bait. All you did was help. And you had no idea.”

  “So you took the photo of me hoping it would go viral and get me burned out of the CIA for good, right? Or do you just have a thing for me?”

  Sveta smiles at that, which hopefully means I’m distracting her enough to charge her.

  “You’re half right.”

  “So what’s the other half of the story? What did you plan to do with me if you had found me in the chem lab? What other reason is there to make my photo go viral?”

  “The photo was meant to scare your people into coming here and finishing what they started in Ukraine. Having your cover blown and making sure they knew Marchuk was in town assured that. It would be bad publicity if your government knew the CIA was employing teenage operatives on US soil. Spies dislike all publicity, no? Taking you as a hostage was the ace card, as you Amerikanski say.”

  “You took over an entire school,” I say. “The authorities would have come running, with or without me as your hostage.”

  “We didn’t want just any ‘authorities.’ We needed the same organization that took out the old man, so it would look like they were finishing the job. Many people want Junior gone. Clients might suspect Vadim was one of them—after all, the job would have been his if not for…” Sveta doesn’t finish, because it would mean admitting a time when she wasn’t smarter than me. That pause makes her look away for one second, allowing me to move another step closer. “Anyway, we needed our customers to believe the CIA finished him off. I mean, do you really think people would believe you took out Marchuk and his team single-handedly?”

  When I don’t say anything, proving her right, she laughs.

  “That is why the plan worked so well. You were so convinced the attack was about you, Prettyboy, you never saw the real threat coming. Do you think I would do all this to chase you here, to this country, just to ruin you?” She points the rifle at me. “I could have done that without either of us leaving Ukraine.”

  She’s got a point there.

  “Marchuk does not give a damn about you. Well, yes, he wanted to kill you,” she muses as she circles Bunker, never taking her eyes off me, “but avenging his father wasn’t enough to come out of hiding and put himself on American soil for easy capture. I gave him better bait.”

  “Better bait? What are you talking about?”

  It must be the bigger thing Katie still hasn’t told me about. The package. Which means I have absolutely zero leverage here because I was never critical to this mission. Marchuk might have wanted me brought in alive so he could kill me himself, but he’s probably in Berg’s custody by now. I am of no use to Sveta or Koval at this point.

  Sveta laughs, and I swear it is the laugh of a cartoon evil queen, but she doesn’t answer my question.

  “Now that I’ve told you all my secrets, I have to kill you. And obviously, I’ll have to kill your friend, since he just heard all of that.”

  “Wait a minute. Maybe we can work something out,” I say, reciting the desperate plea of captives everywhere.

  “I know. It’s really too bad I have to kill you. You’re both so cute, and this one with the crush on me and all. But it must be done.”

  Then the crazy chick starts singing a kid’s chant to figure out which of us she will shoot first. I’m going to die at the hands of a psycho, and the last words I’ll ever hear will be duck, duck, goose.

  CHAPTER 27

  In the child’s game, she would be circling both Bunker and me, but Sveta isn’t stupid. She remains behind Bunker and keeps her distance from me. I’d hit Bunker, not her, if I threw the Phillips-head. If I charged, she’d squeeze off several rounds into me before I even took a second step. And then she’d kill Bunker before my body hit the floor.

  I look at Bunker and the only thing I see in his eyes is him pleading with me to get us out of this thing. My last thought is going to be how I broke the few promises I’ve ever made to him.

  “I’m so sorry,” I say to my first and last true friend. “I wish I hadn’t gotten you mixed up in this.”

  Just as Sveta is at her third duck, Katie falls through the ceiling and onto the psycho’s back.

  Sveta is thrown off-balance, and before she can figure out what just happened, Katie has the girl on the ground, her arm around Sveta’s neck in a death grip. It takes a second to hit me that I’m not going to die today, or at least not in this moment, before I realize Sveta just might.

  “Whoa, Katie. We need her alive.”

  “I’m not telling you anything,” Sveta says as best she can with Katie’s forearm crushing her windpipe.

  “Don’t get it twisted. I’ll make you talk,” I tell her.

  But my first priority is freeing Bunker, and when I do, before I can even remove his gag, he hugs me like I haven’t been hugged since my parents died. Out of all the foster homes I ever lived in—even where the parents cared something about me—and in all the group homes, and even the makeshift families on the street who adopted me when I was homeless, no one hugged me like this. So I hug him back. But only for a second because Katie is watching, and this isn’t something operatives do unless it’s part of a con. And even if she wasn’t looking, I’m more messed up than Bunker knows, and that much … trust … from a person is more than I can handle in a single dose.

  Or maybe Bunker does know, because he gives me a quick back-pat and steps way back from me.

  “We got her,” he says after removing his gag.

  “Hate to admit it, but I think she got her. I guess I’m back to owing you one, Katie.”

  “No. I mean we have her. See,” Bunker says, pulling his walkie-phone out of his pocket, “I recorded the whole thing. Before I let her get the best of me, I switched on the recorder. She’s going down.”

  “Are you serious? That is outstanding, Bunker. You make one helluva partner.”

  Bunker is cheesing so hard, you wouldn’t think the guy had been holding back tears just a couple of minutes ago.

  “I take it Koval isn’t here, then?” Katie asks.

  “No. I was going to ask her about—”

  But before I can, Katie sticks her with a needle.

  Sveta laughs feebly before she says, “Doesn’t matter. You’re too late.”

  “What do you mean?” I ask, but Sveta’s out cold.

  “Why’d you do that, Katie?”

  “Koval isn’t here; she wasn’t going to reveal anything about him or my asset, so we have no use for her.”

  “Yeah, about that. You’d best start talking, MI6.”

  “Oh, wait, are you serious?” Bunker interrupts. “Katie’s a British spy? That is so—”

  Katie looks like she wants to lay me out. “I cannot believe you just blew my cover.”

  “I’m going to tell him a bunch of other stuff about you if you don’t start speaking truth. Right now.”

  Katie grabs my arm and pulls me away from Bunker. “Not in front of him.”

  “That’s cool. Go ahead, take a minute. I’ll just hang out here in this chair I almost died in. I don’t need to know your spy secrets. You’d probably have to kill me if you told me, right?” Bunker laughs at his own joke, probably trying to work himself down from the case of nerves that comes with almost being killed.

  “Who are you here to p
rotect?” I ask once we’re out of earshot of Bunker, but Katie doesn’t answer. “If you’re really on the right side of this thing, you need to trust me. You have to tell me or I can’t help you.”

  “Who said I needed your help? I think you’re misremembering the events of the last hour. As I recall you were tied to a chair, about to be tortured.”

  “Nothing like almost dying together to build trust.”

  “I was never in danger of dying.”

  “Have you forgotten Koval?”

  “I would have gotten out of that. You didn’t give me the chance.”

  She takes a seat on a workbench and goes quiet again as she starts looking through her bag, pulling out stuff in search of something that must be buried at the bottom. When she pulls out the pencil case, I reflexively take a defensive stance.

  “Oh my God, Peter. I’m not going to sedate you. I’m just taking inventory. And if you could just be quiet for a moment while I think this out, that would be dandy.”

  It isn’t like we have all the time in the world; but the day has been a shocker for both of us, so I give her a few minutes to think. It gives me a chance to reassess, too, starting from the beginning.

  The hostiles have only breached one classroom, as far as I know. Since it was my chem class, no one can blame me for thinking they were after me, even if the hacker, Marchuk, and Katie want to act like I think I’m all that.

  So if they didn’t drop through my chem lab ceiling for me, who were they after? Just about every student at Carlisle could be a target if the hostiles were looking to kidnap and ransom for money. Marchuk needs to fund his terrorist activities. Maybe he figured he could kill two birds with one stone—or one Peter Smith with one bullet, in this case—ransom a rich kid and kill me, too. If that’s what he wanted, the gold-mine heiress who sits in the front row of my class would be the perfect target.

  But Katie said the asset is a “him.” And I’m pretty sure she isn’t here to kidnap and ransom a rich kid if she’s really who she says she is. While the whole monarchy thing must be crazy expensive for them to keep going, surely the British government isn’t that desperate for money. And the asset is someone Katie alleges I made “nicey-nicey” with, which definitely rules out Duncan, despite the fact that he’s mad rich. I mentally scan my chem classroom.

  Of course—how did I miss it?

  We all arrived at Carlisle this semester—Katie, me, and the hacker, though she played the role of a freshman, which removed her from my suspect list. That means the target is also a new arrival, an American who’d affected a mild English accent because he’d spent the last three years there. The kid whose father is working on encryption codes to secure our nuclear defense system. How could I not have seen it when he’d been sitting right next to me for the last eight weeks? To my credit, it had been one of my earlier theories.

  “Marchuk wasn’t here for me. Or … at least not only for me. He’s here for Joel Easter. And so are you.”

  I know I’m right the second Katie closes her pencil box, throws it into her bag, and stands to leave. I block her way, which I know by now is probably a bad idea, but I take my chances.

  “Are you going to let me by or will I have to hurt you?” Katie asks.

  “Just wait a second, will you? Our missions are clearly linked. How is yours tied to Marchuk?”

  “I’d never heard of Marchuk until today. My people picked up some chatter about a most-wanted arms dealer landing at Denver International yesterday.”

  “That must have been the chatter Sveta wanted both of our countries to hear—Berg’s irrefutable proof.”

  “We didn’t have any details—name, photo, anything—so standard protocol was for all operatives in the area to go on high alert.”

  “All operatives? How many MI6 are in Denver, anyway?”

  “I suspect far fewer than the number of CIA that are currently in, oh, Manchester, let’s say. Knowing all your friend’s secrets strengthens the bond. Speaking of which, you still haven’t told me everything about this hacker.”

  “She’s helping Marchuk—well, Koval—go after Joel. I guess you know about the work Joel’s dad is doing.”

  “Of course. He was doing it for us before your country lured him away. I can assure you that it will be bad for both our countries—pretty much the whole world—if Koval gets hold of that encryption technology.”

  “Whoever gets that information might be able to access our weapons systems—”

  “And ours. Remember, we had him first,” Katie says.

  “This thing is bigger than us or our countries. I see why you were worried about all seven billion of us. Terrorists could gain access to the most powerful weapons arsenal in the world. Well, I mean, access to two of the most powerful arsenals in the world.”

  We both know that comparing our military capacity to theirs is like comparing a shoulder-launched surface-to-air missile to a Super Soaker, but I figure it doesn’t hurt to throw Katie and the Brits a bone. I figure wrong.

  “Do you know what I hate more than guys telling me not to worry?” Katie asks.

  “Um, no?” Actually, I do, because I saw what happened to Marchuk.

  “Guys condescending to me. Now get out of my way before I make you regret doing that.”

  I do, but with every intention of following her, because in all my worrying about the matchbook stuck in the front door, then Duncan sitting in my seat and harassing me about the Twitter thing, I didn’t notice that Joel wasn’t at my table today.

  “You went AWOL during the fire drill—did that have anything to do with Joel?”

  “You noticed, huh?” Katie asks, but answers her own question before I can. “Of course. You’re an operative. Joel was in the class across from ours, and since they were lined up in the hall alongside us, I plucked him out and showed him a secret hiding place. I told him about the chatter this morning and that he should go there if he had even the slightest worry.”

  “So Joel knows you’re MI6?”

  “He thinks I’m the same person I was when I protected him in London—part of a private security team hired by his father. I was undercover and went to school with him. We made sure I was in all of his classes. There have been threats to his family before this one,” Katie explains. “Anyway, I sincerely hope he’s in that safe room right now, waiting for me to come give him word that it’s safe to leave.”

  “That’s why you didn’t want me to kill Koval—in case he’d somehow gotten to Joel.”

  So much is making sense now. I wished she’d trusted me enough to tell me earlier. Maybe I’d have risked going through that stairwell door, even though I’d still have kept her from going.

  “I was ninety-nine percent certain Joel was okay, but that one percent was enough to worry me, especially after Marchuk talked about Koval moving packages. I needed to confirm Koval hadn’t gotten to Joel first and taken him somewhere I’d never find. But we ran into him in the hall and he grabbed me. Then we got locked out on the roof. Then Berg came—”

  “But I slowed you down trying to save Bunker, and then you had to come save us both.”

  “Of course, I wanted to help you, but I also hoped Koval would be here with Joel. When he wasn’t … and now that we know about the groundskeeper’s tunnel…”

  Katie doesn’t—or can’t—finish her thought. I want to do for her what she did for me up on the roof. Make her feel the mission is still viable.

  “No, I’m certain Koval hasn’t taken him from the building. Joel never showed up in my chem lab and wasn’t there when the hostiles invaded. As long as they didn’t find out where you told him to hide, Joel should still be here.”

  “We need to get to the main office,” Katie says, heading for the stairs.

  I follow her, and Bunker takes that as his cue to rejoin us.

  “That’s where you’re hiding him?” I ask. “The school is swarming with CIA and locals, with the highest concentration of them probably in the office.”

  “Not in
the office. Across from it.”

  “Across from the office is the trophy case,” Bunker points out.

  “Exactly,” Katie says as though that should explain everything.

  Carlisle’s trophy case is nothing like you’d find in any other school. For one thing, it takes up nearly the whole wall opposite the office. There are a lot of famous people out there who made their earliest marks on the world while they were at Carlisle, so the case holds not only awards they earned here, but recognition for whatever they did after. We’ve had two governors, one secretary of defense, an opera singer, so many Nobel prize winners and MacArthur grant recipients that it’s embarrassing, and even a couple of Olympic medalists despite Carlisle’s fairly sad sports tradition.

  “Ah, the trophy case,” I say. The case is so big there’s an alcove at either end, both with doors to access the back of it. “We should take the stairs that come out on the end farthest from the office. Then it’s only a few steps to the alcove.”

  “Won’t it be locked?” Bunker asks.

  “There are only two sets of keys as far as I know, and I lifted both from the office earlier this morning. Joel has one and I have the other,” Katie explains. “Plus, we always have you. With all those muscles, in a pinch you could probably just knock the door in, right?”

  Bunker just starts beaming, but it’s hard to tell whether she’s for-real flirting with him or spy-flirting. You should never trust anything a spy tells you. We don’t always know how to separate truth from truthiness. Still, I do feel a little twinge of jealousy.

  Luckily, Berg’s team hasn’t begun searching the lowest level of the building yet, so we reach the first floor with no problem. Katie is about to open the door to check whether the coast is clear, but Bunker stops her.

  “Let me. It’s okay if they catch me. If there’s a cop right outside the door, you guys can go back the way you came and let me take one for the team.”

  Katie puts a hand on his arm and says, “Oh, Bunk-ah. You’re so gallant.”

  Bunker starts grinning until he catches the evil look I’m throwing at him and cracks the door open before closing it again. “So here’s the situation. There are two uniforms guarding the office, which now appears to be the command center. I ascertained—”