Prettyboy Must Die

by Kimberly Reid

  Jones doesn’t look too pleased with my assessment, but gets on his phone and hurriedly tells someone to be on the lookout for a possible missing agent.

  “Might you two chest-pound some other time, Peter?” Katie asks when Jones finishes his call, her already-thin patience nearly worn out.

  “Right. So they must have planned Carlisle as the drop point for Mr. Easter to deliver his encryption software. No one would think anything of him visiting the school, and having Joel wrapped up here in World Geo, they had leverage to make sure his dad delivered. They never expected Maitland would screw up his part of the plan. All he had to do was take Joel to wherever Koval was holding his dad.”

  “I bet Maitland did something to scare Joel into asking for a hall pass and never coming back,” Katie says.

  “Probably,” I say, recalling how nervous Maitland was about handing over his laptop to me. Now I wish I’d let him tell me why he needed it so badly. He wouldn’t have told me the truth, but his lie might have been a clue.

  “So Mr. Easter was supposed to bring his encryption data to Carlisle, Koval hands over Joel,” Jones says.

  “Except he won’t. We all know they never hand over the collateral.”

  We’re all worried, but Katie sounds and looks like she’s way past that point. I guess after guarding Joel in England, he has become more than just a mission for her. I don’t want her going on tilt thinking how Koval won’t be freeing Joel, so I pretend I didn’t hear what she said and focus on the mission.

  “It wasn’t as simple as that. I’m guessing Easter signed in and out at the same time. He wanted it to appear as though he’d come and gone, when really he remained in the building.”

  “But why not just hand over the flash drive or whatever and get out? Why hang around?” Katie asks.

  “Maybe at the last minute Easter had second thoughts on handing it over,” Jones says.

  “No, not when his kid’s life is at stake,” I say.

  I remember what Marchuk said in the office, that Koval was “making sure package is secure until other package arrives safely.” Joel must have been the first package. But Dr. Easter was already in the building by then, so he couldn’t have been the second package Marchuk was waiting on to arrive.

  “I think he had to do some work on his code before he could hand it off to Marchuk. He couldn’t just download all the algorithms and cyphers onto a flash drive and walk out of NIST without cybersecurity noticing,” I explain. “He probably had to copy off bits and pieces of the code to keep from raising attention from security, and then brought them here to assemble it back together. I’m not an expert on the cryptography side of hacking, but I’m certain reassembling the code takes more than a minute.”

  Marchuk was waiting on the “arrival” of the reassembled code.

  “Berg’s team was in position while we were in that hallway dealing with Koval. No way could Koval and Easter have gotten past the perimeter Berg set up,” Katie says, sounding hopeful for the first time since we discovered Jones behind the trophy case instead of Joel. “They’re still here.”

  Jones must be hopeful, too, because he almost smiles. Or maybe he’s impressed by just how good a couple of seventeen-year-old operatives are.

  “Let me get some backup and also make sure we take that teacher into custody. I’ll be right back.”

  The second Jones leaves the room, Katie says, “I bet they went to Maitland’s office to put the code back together.”

  “You’re probably right, though Koval would be taking a risk with CIA sweeping the building. They may have moved. Maitland’s office is kind of out of the way though, maybe they haven’t gotten to it yet,” I say, before I realize where this is going. “Hold on, Katie. You heard Jones—we need backup, you’re a foreign operative—”

  “You’re crazy if you think I’m waiting. Jones will catch up,” Katie says. “Follow me or don’t, but I’m going to save Joel.”

  CHAPTER 32

  When we get to Maitland’s office, it’s locked.

  “That’s probably a good sign they’re still in there. I’ve been in Maitland’s office and his desk is off to the right. I’m good at picking locks, so if we can sneak in and surprise them, we’ll—”

  Katie just kicks the door in. But she shouldn’t have.

  Nolan Easter is on a laptop, busy giving terrorists access to our nuclear codes; Joel is looking dazed and confused, as though he still can’t believe any of this is happening; and Koval’s standing there with a gun on both of them. It’s a helluva lot bigger than that rinky-dink flute thing Katie’s holding.

  “Let him go, Koval,” Katie demands. “Take his dad if you want, but let Joel go.”

  Her patience skills are weak, but I’d give her an A for bravery. Koval’s response is just what I expect—he laughs at Katie and her gun, which looks like it came from Toys “R” Us.

  “Surely you don’t expect me to do that. What leverage would I have then?” Koval asks. “Besides, we’re almost done here—right, Easter?”

  “Look, Koval, you have no chance of getting out of this building,” I warn him. “Jones is already pissed about you knocking him out, and now he’s on his way with reinforcements.”

  Koval keeps the gun on the Easters but he watches Katie and me for our reaction. His expression is a mix of sinister and joyful expectation, something I’ve seen before in people who get their kicks tormenting others. As though this whole ordeal could be as much about pleasure as it is about business.

  “Perhaps, but he doesn’t know exactly where you are. Before he left for those reinforcements, you didn’t tell him you’d be coming to Maitland’s office.”

  “You have mics on us?”

  Koval just vaporized the confidence I felt when breaking down his mission for Jones a minute ago. Just when I think I’ve got a handle on this spy business, these guys one-up me. When could he have possibly dropped a bug on me? I checked the clothes I’m wearing when I took them off the hostile.

  He smirks and says, “On Jones. I planted it after I knocked him out and took the boy from the trophy case.”

  Katie takes a step forward, her gun held straight out in front of her. I attempt to diffuse her move by trying to reason with Koval, hoping I’ve read him wrong.

  “That’s right. You only knocked him out. You didn’t kill him, though you could have. You didn’t hurt Rachel or Katie when you found them in the hall, even though you suspected her.”

  Koval grabs Joel’s hand and raises it where Katie and I can see. “Do not question my ability to hurt him or anyone else.”

  Okay, so maybe reasoning was the wrong tactic with this guy.

  “Look, Koval, you don’t really want to hurt a civilian, a kid—”

  I’m cut off by Joel’s scream piercing the room as Koval crushes his hand inside his own bear-sized paw.

  Katie fires her gun. It has zero effect on Koval. He’s still standing there looking scared, then surprised, then amused. But me? I can’t seem to stay upright.

  I feel myself falling and can’t do anything about it. I don’t hear anything except the sound of people running from the room, and then nothing.

  * * *

  When I come to for the second time today, Jones is standing over me.

  “What the hell just happened?”

  It feels like I’ve been out for days, but the clock on Maitland’s wall tells me it has only been a few minutes, which is plenty enough time for Koval to have hurt Joel even more than he already has. And if Mr. Easter finished the reassembly job, a few minutes is more than enough time for both Easters to be dead. I need to go find them before time runs out, but I can’t even stand up.

  Beside me, Katie also tries to stand, but Jones has to catch her as she loses her balance.

  “I must have put the flute together wrong and it backfired.”

  “Then you’d be dead, unless that wasn’t a gun you fired,” I say, already suspecting it wasn’t, considering this is Katie.

  “It doesn�
��t shoot bullets. It was supposed to shoot nerve gas to render Koval unconscious, but I must have assembled the flute wrong and it got us instead.”

  “So where are they now?” Jones asks.

  “I don’t know,” Katie says, “but Joel needs a doctor. That beast probably broke every bone in his hand. Hopefully, he hasn’t done anything worse. Yet.”

  Jones instructs the two agents he brought as backup to go find Koval before he says, “You two also need a doctor. I’m calling an EMT, and you’re sitting out the rest of the mission.”

  “No. Absolutely not. The effects of the gas wear off quickly.” Katie not only gets to her feet to prove it, she leaves the office, and this time it’s our turn to follow her. “And Koval’s on the run.”

  “I don’t think he’d leave without his sister. Wait a minute. Jones, did you know you’re mic’d up?”

  “Yeah, I figured it out on the way back here. It’s gone now.”

  “She probably told him she planned to ambush and kill me in the basement,” I continue. “Koval obviously knows that didn’t work out well for her. If he left with them, it’s either because Dr. Easter didn’t finish putting the code back together, he needs them as hostages to safely leave campus, or both. Sveta probably knows where he’d go.”

  “We might even find him with her,” Jones says. “I assume you gave Sveta more of that tranquilizer than you gave me, so she’s probably still unconscious.”

  “I’m going to wake her up with a shot of opioid antagonist to reverse the effects of the tranquilizer, and then I’m going to make her wish I hadn’t.”

  Yeeeah. Katie is a little scary.

  When we reach the sub-basement, Sveta is gone. I shouldn’t have expected any different. All day, it’s been one step forward for the bad guys, two steps back for us.

  “How is that even possible? I checked her pulse before we left her and her heart rate had already begun to slow,” Katie says. “And even if she came to, Houdini couldn’t have escaped the ties I put on her.”

  “You think Berg got to her first?” Jones asks.

  “No, we’d have heard it on the radio.” Katie holds up a Motorola. She must notice the incredulous look on my face because she adds, “I snagged it from a desk in the office while Agent Jones was setting that cretin straight.”

  “Well, I know that cretin, and he is not very discreet,” I say, “at least not when it comes to bragging about himself. Believe me, if Berg had found Sveta or her brother, he’d be patting himself on the back about it all over that radio.”

  “Damn it!” Jones yells, the first time I’ve ever seen him lose his cool. “Koval got here first.”

  “That would mean he’s moving around with three people now,” I say, because it seems so unlikely. “He knows we’re after him, assumes Berg and his team are. Four people make for an easy target. Koval would never be so obvious.”

  Jones draws his weapon as we all realize there’s a good chance Koval is still down here somewhere, hiding in the shadows. He hands me the backup revolver from his ankle holster, then nods and hand-signals our directives. Katie and I go the opposite direction of Jones. Thirty seconds later, we all return to the center of the room, having found nothing.

  “I still can’t see Koval trying to move around with Sveta and two hostages,” Katie says. “What are you doing?”

  I look up at her for a second before staring at the floor again, walking slowly across the room. “Looking around for a trap door in the floor, like we found in the shed and the janitor’s office. Y’all could help, you know.”

  “But we’re in the sub-basement. It seems unlikely, especially in Colorado. Isn’t there a lot of rock near the surface?” Katie says.

  “Good point, but I’m desperate here.” I look overhead. “The ceilings, maybe?”

  “They’re pretty high. You’d need a ladder, and I don’t see a ladder anywhere,” Jones says, being about as helpful as Katie.

  “Okaaay … let’s check the walls, then. There’s a camera in the hallway outside the door, and Sveta had to assume Berg’s team was watching the monitors,” I say, beginning to pace between them. “There are no windows, and yet she’s gone. I suppose she could have turned off the cameras. She did have a smartwatch. But Berg probably turned off her connectivity, so—”

  That’s when I notice there’s a partial handprint on the dusty shelf I’m standing next to. I can tell by the thick layer of dust on the floor that the shelf had been here a long time, undisturbed, until today. Someone tried to move the shelf back to its original position, but didn’t quite make it. I swing one side of the shelf out a few inches from the wall.

  “What did you find?” Katie asks.

  “I don’t know yet, but at some point recently, someone moved this shelf.”

  Jones takes the other end of the shelf and we move it a couple of feet away from the wall. I run my hand over it and realize it isn’t a wall at all.

  “There’s a draft,” I say.

  “Hidden door?” Katie asks, and feels for the draft before pushing her shoulder against one side of the door.

  It works like a lever and opens the side near me. Inside, we find a safe room that definitely wasn’t part of the blueprints I’d memorized.

  And inside the safe room are Joel and his father.

  People outside the building can probably hear us all sigh in relief.

  But that feeling doesn’t last long.

  As soon as I remove the tape from Mr. Easter’s mouth, he says, “You’re too late. He already has the flash drive with all my research on it. I’m sorry, but I had to save my son. You saw what he did to Joel’s hand. He would have killed us.”

  Though I never needed to, I’ve been willing to kill before—for survival, or to complete a mission—but I never wanted to. Until now. Koval had better hope I’m not the first one to find him.

  “And the hacker—a blond girl—was with him?” I ask.

  “We saw her, but she didn’t come inside the safe room with us. It was only him,” Joel answers after Jones removes his duct-tape gag.

  “That makes sense. Someone had to move the shelf back into position after Koval took you two inside with him. And it was too heavy for her to get it back in the exact right position.”

  “Or she was in a hurry and didn’t care about making it look perfect,” Jones says.

  “Now that I think about it, she wouldn’t have cared if Berg caught her on the stairwell camera. He doesn’t know she’s the hacker, who he thinks is in London somewhere. Berg won’t be looking for her. She can just walk right out the door past his guards, the last straggler student to evacuate,” I say.

  “So Sveta is in the wind, too,” Katie says.

  Joel’s father says, “I think he intended to take us with him as hostages, but changed his mind once we got in here. Maybe he figured we’d slow him down. The only reason my son isn’t dead…” He doesn’t finish the sentence, probably overwhelmed by the thought of it.

  “Is because he heard you outside the door, moving the shelf, and got scared,” Joel says, finishing his father’s thought. He points to another door in the safe room opposite the one we entered. “He took off running through there.”

  “With the encryption technology that protects us from launching a nuclear strike,” I say, the enormity of it sinking in.

  Mr. Easter regains his composure and adds, “It must lead to a tunnel of some sort. Perhaps you can still catch him.”

  When Mr. Easter says tunnel, it reminds me of something. Maybe we aren’t down for the count just yet.

  “Jones, when I was on the roof, I remember seeing an old shed. I thought it was odd because it was too far away from the school to be of any use. If there are passageways down here, maybe that’s where it comes out above ground. And if I remember right, it’s just outside Berg’s perimeter.”

  “Smith, I like the way you think,” Jones says. “I’ll try to reach the shed first and head him off above ground. You and Carmichael take the tunnel. Maybe you ca
n catch up to him.”

  It sounds like a good plan to me, but Katie doesn’t respond. In fact, she has been unusually quiet. When we look up to get Katie’s confirmation, she is gone.

  CHAPTER 33

  The tunnel is dark and I can’t see a thing, but at least it was built by professionals—it’s not one of the groundkeeper’s makeshift dirt tunnels. All kinds of fear are running through me right now—fear of being ambushed by Koval, of him unleashing Armageddon on the world, of losing Katie—but at least I don’t have to worry about the walls closing in on me—literally. I can stand at full height, which means I can move quickly—or I could if only I could see a damn thing.

  Katie has her flashlight, but she must already be too far ahead for me to see it. Or maybe she decided against using it. All I have is my phone. The choice is between using it so I can see where I’m going—along with whoever might be waiting there for me—or stumbling around in total darkness. I assume Koval is trying to get the hell out and didn’t hang around in order to capture me, so I go with option one. My flashlight app isn’t great, but at least now I’m able to see whether the tunnel just goes straight ahead or has right angles, which would also explain why I can’t see the beam of Katie’s light.

  She can’t be more than thirty seconds ahead of me, but so far, there are no signs of her. I want to call out her name, but that would broadcast to Koval that she’s on his tail. About ten yards into the tunnel, I come to a four-way stop. I figured it might happen, but it might as well be a brick wall.

  Come on Jake, no freaking out. Choose one.

  But choosing the wrong tunnel will cost me time. Plus, there are no markings to distinguish one tunnel from the others, so if I have to backtrack and I’m not careful, I might screw up and disorient myself.

  Duh, Jake.

  I pull the Sharpie from my pocket and draw an arrow on the floor pointing behind me, toward the safe room, a way out if the other three tunnels turn out to be dead ends.