Prettyboy Must Die

by Kimberly Reid

  Just as I’m about to choose a path, I hear something. Since I don’t know if the something is good or bad, I can’t call out. Using my flashlight is also a bad idea, so I make it go dark. The pitch blackness clears my thoughts, and I realize the sound can only be bad. Katie knew I would follow her. If she’d caught Koval and heard me coming, or if she’d seen the light from my phone, she would call out to me. At the very least, her flashlight would be shining.

  Being in the dark also forces me to sharpen my other senses. I’m still standing at the intersection of the four tunnels. They’re close. I’d have heard their footsteps if they had moved on. I know they aren’t in the tunnel behind me, so I turn to my left, count off five paces, arms outstretched, and stop just inside the first tunnel. I hear nothing. Smell nothing. I walk backwards five paces, which should put me back in the center of the intersection. Then I turn right, and do the same thing in the second tunnel, the one I’d have taken in the first place had I just gone straight ahead. Again, I hear and smell nothing.

  One tunnel left. Like my mind is on a delay, I realize the sound was familiar—a jangling of keys, but muted, as though Koval has put the keychain in his pocket rather than wearing it on his belt loop. In this final tunnel, I do the same thing, stepping just inside it. I don’t hear anything, but smell strawberries and creosote.

  Katie smelled of both those things, but if she was here alone, she’d have called my name by now. If she’d taken down Koval, she’d be talking smack about how she bagged the bad guy first.

  So they’re both close, except the bad guy has bagged her.

  It feels like everything inside me drops at the same time: my stomach, my nerve, my heart. But I keep it together because that madman has Katie.

  I step back as silently as I can, hoping Koval doesn’t have a dog-boy olfactory sense like I do. I need just a couple of seconds to think how this will play out in a way that doesn’t get Katie or me killed. The element of surprise would be great, but he must have seen my flashlight. Koval must assume I followed Katie. He knows I’m close. Probably knows what Katie means to me, so he has that advantage.

  But where we both have a level playing ground is the pitch blackness. Except he’s been in the tunnels at least a minute longer, and without light longer. Less than a minute has passed since I had my phone on. My pupils have dilated, but not as much as his. Bright light will be more his enemy than mine.

  “I know you’re there, kid,” Koval says, confirming my theories.

  I guess he’s grown tired of waiting for me to make my move. I have to make one soon, because each second I don’t means losing the advantage of less sensitivity to light. But what if the move I make is the wrong one? Fear of getting it wrong nearly paralyzes me.

  “And you know I have your girl.”

  These are the words I need to kick me into gear, and they are enough sound from Koval that I can judge how close he is to me: just a few feet ahead in the tunnel and slightly to my left.

  “Come out, come out, wherever you are.”

  Koval thinks he has the advantage. Any other day, it would be true. He has more experience. He has no compassion. He has my girl.

  But that last thing is what wills me to stop him. I raise my gun, ready to shoot in the direction just below his center of gravity. I need to already have my aim as close to the target as possible because I’ll only have a few seconds. But Katie is probably positioned in front of him, as a shield. Now I can hear her breathing. It isn’t elevated, but regular.

  “Get out of here, Peter, while you can!”

  Katie’s words confirm that she is being restrained, but she has all her senses about her, too.

  “What are you waiting for?” Koval singsongs the words like we’re playing a game.

  One last surge of doubt rises in my gut, trying to immobilize me, but I push it down with a single thought: If I don’t act, Katie will die.

  I hold up my phone with my other hand and click the camera. The flash brightens the tunnel with intense light. It’s a bit brighter for Katie than it is for me, but brightest of all for Koval’s more dilated pupils.

  In that briefest moment, I see Katie drop and roll right.

  I flash the camera again, long enough to see Koval raise his weapon, but I have the jump. I’ve already aimed. When the bullet hits his left knee, he goes down before he can get off a single round.

  I hear the sound of metal against bone. Maglite against skull. When I turn on my phone’s flashlight, Katie is standing over Koval, smiling.

  I smile back. “Now we’re even.”

  CHAPTER 34

  After a debriefing with three different agencies—local police, FBI, and CIA—nothing about my story has changed. Not the part where I, with a lot of help from a few friends, keep a building full of people and our national security safe.

  Or the part where I’m basically out of the spy business.

  As happy as I am about the first half, especially considering it was supposed to end with me on a slab in the morgue if Marchuk had his way, I’m totally bummed about the second. I love being an operative, and just when I figure out I’m pretty damn good at it after all, they take the job away from me. That doesn’t mean I won’t keep fighting for it.

  “But boss, I was never supposed to be in the field anyway,” I plead with Rogers, who got on a Company plane the moment she knew Berg had found me safe in that stairwell. So now I get to make my case in person. “Why not put me back on the desk and let me continue hacking?”

  “And you’d be happy just hacking?” Rogers asks.

  She leans back against the same squad car I was locked inside of three hours ago. I can tell from her expression that she won’t believe me, no matter how hard I try to convince her I’ll be happy just hacking. I guess that’s why she’s the boss spy. And she’d be right, because I’d be lying.

  “After all this Prettyboy stuff dies down, maybe I could—”

  “Exactly what I thought,” Rogers interrupts. “I’ve never met an officer who got a taste of working in the field and wanted to come back to the office. Look, we’ll keep you on the payroll long enough to finish the school year and graduate with your friend—what’s his name again?”

  I laugh when Bunk’s real name pops into my head. “We call him Bunker.”

  “Well, you deserve at least that, a normal senior year, after the great work you’ve done here.” Rogers smiles, but only for a second. “Though you should have told Berg about the hacker, what she looked like. She walked right out of here, free and clear.”

  It’s true. I spotted her on Carlisle’s surveillance video during my debriefing with Berg. The time stamp showed that she already had a couple hours’ jump on us by then.

  “I tried to tell Berg about the hacker,” I argue.

  “You should have tried harder,” Rogers says in a tone that suggests she’s about done hearing my case. “Just take my offer to finish school and be happy about it.”

  “Okay, I accept,” I say, as though I have a choice. “But I want normal only for the next seven months. People have the attention span of a gnat. By the time I graduate, people will have forgotten—”

  “Sorry, Peter, we can’t take that risk for you or other operatives,” Rogers says, and I know she’s right. “Your face is just too recognizable for covert ops in the intelligence business. But you’re the best hacker I’ve ever worked with. I’ll find you something in another agency. They’re always looking for people at the IRS.”

  I laugh until I realize she’s serious. “You mean the tax people? I’m a hacker, not a number cruncher.”

  “Don’t mock them. Their criminal investigations unit took down Al Capone when no one else could.”

  I let it go, mostly because Rogers isn’t hearing any of it, but also because there are worse places to be a suspended CIA operative. For a down-and-out hacker trying to prove his way back into the Company, Colorado is paradise with all the federal agencies here I can crack. Or spy on, for the team. NORAD is just down the
road, and there’s nearby New Mexico and all the labs down there working on serious top-secret stuff. Which reminds me.

  “What about the hacker? Sveta Koval isn’t the type to retire just because her brother and old boss are in prison. She’ll resurface. I could track her down just like I did before and—”

  “And nothing, Smith, unless you want me to fire you today,” Rogers threatens before leaving me so she can help Berg and Jones deal with the throng of media that has gathered in front of Carlisle.

  The Internal Revenue Service. Despite what Rogers said about Al Capone, I imagine a life filled with tax returns and paper shuffling. It’s depressing.

  “Don’t look so down,” says a voice from behind me. “You’re a hero, Prettyboy.”

  It’s a good thing Katie is the one who says it, because I have vowed to knock out the next person to call me that.

  “Better get used to it if you plan on staying at Carlisle. Or even in this country. Look,” she says, pointing to the crowd outside the line of parked police cars that Berg is using to create a Maginot Line for the media. “Those girls should be at home in the arms of their parents, or at least having a Netflix binge, after the day they’ve had, but they came back to cheer for you.”

  “A few hours ago, a couple of them were part of the library posse trying to give me up to Koval.”

  “Well, people do crazy things when they’re under duress.”

  I wonder if she’s talking about what she said to me when we both thought we were about to die, about being my girlfriend. But instead of asking, I just follow her as she starts walking down the long driveway away from the crowd. We’re quiet for a few minutes as we climb the ridge and start heading down again toward Carlisle’s gated entrance and the main road.

  “They love me for now. I only have to wait until a prettier boy goes viral.”

  “A prettier boy? There can be no other,” Katie says, trying to sound like Hollywood Voice-over Guy. “Not that I think you’re pretty.”

  “Way to make me feel better.”

  “No. I mean that isn’t how I’d describe you.”

  She looks over at me like she’s just seeing me for the first time. And I know she isn’t seeing a CIA operative, or even Peter Smith. Katie sees only me—Jake Morrow. The guy who is crazy about her.

  “I think ruggedly handsome is more appropriate,” she continues, and I wonder if she can tell I’m grinning inside. “Pretty boys have never been my thing. I like to be the only pretty one in the relationship and I’m not ashamed to say it.”

  I think Katie just said what I’ve wanted to hear since I first met her at new student orientation. So I want to make sure I heard right.

  “Is that what we are—in a relationship?”

  “I don’t know.” She looks off toward the mountains, like she’s really thinking it through. “It’ll be hard with you staying here and me being shipped off to … well, you know…”

  “I know. That’s classified.”

  Katie stops on the side of the drive, near the oddly placed shed. Seeing it sends a shiver of dread through me, but it goes away the minute Katie takes my hand and asks, “But we’re in something, wouldn’t you say?”

  I remember the question I asked her earlier, and how she never gave me a direct answer.

  “Are you sure you didn’t know who I was when I asked you out? Because the way you kissed me … I mean, after the movie, in your car—”

  For a moment, I think she’s about to kiss me again, right now. Maybe I’m projecting, because I’ve been waiting weeks to put my arms around her again, but her expression says that’s all she wants to do. But she only holds her hand to my cheek for a second, like we’re in some movie. Why do girls do that? Don’t they know a kiss would be so much more effective at getting the guy? I mean, I’ve already been got, but still.

  “I told you. I don’t lie. At least, I won’t lie to you ever again. I knew you were a guy who—for the three hours we were on the date, at least—made me forget I was on a mission. Made me forget I am a covert operative, forget all the bad I’ve seen. With you, Petah Smith, I was just a girl who really liked a boy.”

  “Yeah?”

  “I mean really liked,” Katie says, moving closer to me.

  I move in closer, too. “Then you should probably call me Jake Morrow.”

  I’m just about to kiss her when a voice stops me cold.

  “She should probably call you dead.”

  So Blondie isn’t in the wind after all. When I turn around, I expect to find her armed with a rifle or something, but she’s holding a phone. By now, I know that in Sveta Koval’s hands, a phone is never just a phone.

  “At least you’ll die at the hands of your own government,” she says. “Sort of. I hacked an armed drone that was on training maneuvers at Buckley Air Force Base.”

  At that moment, I hear a buzzing noise and look up to see a drone coming over the ridge, aiming right for Katie and me. I instinctively reach for my sidearm, but Rogers took it away. We’re exposed, unarmed, and out in the open. The nearest cover is the stand of Russian olive trees, too far away to be any help.

  Two targets are harder to hit than one, and I know Sveta wants me more than Katie. If Sveta sends her drone after me, Katie might have time to reach those trees. I grab her hand, squeeze, then let it go.

  “Run, Katie!”

  Just as Katie takes off running, I hear a car come over the ridge, followed by a loud thump. I turn back in time to see Sveta on the car’s hood, her phone flying through the air. No longer under her control, the drone falls to the ground. The car screeches to a stop and Sveta slides off and onto the ground, moaning. For a brief moment, I regret that she’s still alive.

  Bunker jumps out of the car, looking almost as horrified as he did when Sveta had the rifle in his back. That memory makes me not want to call an ambulance for her crazy ass.

  “Did I kill her?”

  “No, unfortunately,” Katie says. “You didn’t hit her quite hard enough. But it will definitely sting for a while.”

  “I didn’t mean to, I swear. I just came over the hill and there she was.”

  I try to shake off the adrenaline rush from almost dying for the umpteenth time today. “You saved our lives, man.”

  “I really wasn’t trying to hit her at all,” Bunker says, sounding freaked out. “I just thought maybe you’d want a ride home, so I came back for you.”

  I pick up Sveta’s phone before going over to her and checking her injuries. There is no visible blood, but the less-evolved part of me can hope for a little internal bleeding. She’s still moaning, but her heart rate is good and her skin isn’t clammy, which means she probably isn’t in shock.

  “She’ll be fine, Bunk. She’s like a roach—nearly impossible to eradicate. Keep an eye on her while I call Rogers to get an EMT and a police escort.”

  “I’ll call.” Bunker takes my phone and nods behind me, where a black SUV is pulling through the gate.

  I’m worried there’s another hostile on the loose because, as everyone knows, covert operatives only travel in black SUVs. But Katie waves at it, and I realize it’s come for her.

  I want to smash something or someone for a million reasons: Rogers for basically firing me, MI6 for taking Katie away, Sveta for ruining everything.

  Then Katie comes over and kisses me and I damn near forget about Sveta, Rogers, and the entire universe. I hold her like it will be the last time. She kisses me again like it’s only a preview of more to come.

  Now she’s smiling at me like we share a secret.

  “See? Told you I wasn’t lying. When your fifteen minutes of fame are done, call me. We’re always looking for exceptional talent.”

  Katie just offered me her heart and a job. My girl is awesome.

  She looks at me like she never wants to leave. In my head, I tell her I don’t ever want her to. We stand there for a second before she breaks away and gets into the SUV, and they drive off.

  So she doesn’t hear me w
hen I say, “I’ll do that. Then I’ll owe you one.”

  Also by Kimberly Reid

  My Own Worst Frenemy

  Creeping with the Enemy

  Sweet 16 to Life

  Guys, Lies & Alibis

  Perfect Liars

  About the Author

  Kimberly Reid prepared early for life as a writer of criminals, sleuths, and international spies—even if she didn’t realize it back then. She lucked into a family that works in police departments, courtrooms, and as private investigators. She attended a high school focused on international relations and later studied national security policy in college. Now Kimberly lives in Colorado and writes stories about all of those things. Visit her online at www.kimberlyreid.com, or sign up for email updates here.

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  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25