by K. C. Archer
She clicked through prompt after prompt. Please, she thought, let him have trouble finding the papers. Finally, the progress bar reached 100 percent. Teddy jerked the flash drive from the port and thrust it back in her pocket. The door swung open behind her.
“Got the report.” He threw the paperwork down on the coffee table. He had pulled on a worn FBI sweatshirt, frayed around the cuffs. No skin to be seen.
Teddy stuffed her hands in her pockets, ran her thumb over the USB drive. “Thanks. Guess I better be going.”
She watched the muscles in his jaw work. He looked down at his hands, avoiding her gaze. “What if we met under different circumstances? What if I really was plain ol’ Nick?”
“And my name really was TeAnne?”
“I’m being serious.”
“So am I,” she said. “But I’m not TeAnne. I’m Teddy Cannon, student at the Whitfield Institute for Law Enforcement Training and Development.”
“You could have waited until morning for that report.”
Her mission was done. She should be out the door. Back to her dorm room, on Molly’s blackmail-borrowed laptop, sifting through the files to find the one that proved Yates’s innocence. Instead, she asked: “What are you saying?”
“I’m saying,” Nick said, taking a step closer, so close that he could reach out and touch her if he wanted to, “that I wish it were different. Don’t you?”
Yes, of course she did. In that moment, more than anything, Teddy wanted things to be different. She wished that Nick really were plain. Or old. But he had the ass of a minor Greek god, and she felt safe in his arms. He’d been with her that morning when she’d seen Corey McDonald take Marlena Hyden’s life. He listened to her when she talked, and encouraged her ideas. He seemed steady, and normal, and real. Like he could be something solid and forever.
But it was none of those things that made her want him more desperately than she’d wanted anyone before. In that moment, more than anything, Teddy wanted to be different. She wanted to be the kind of person who wouldn’t take advantage of Nick. Or Molly. She didn’t want to leave people in her wake.
And just like that, the moment spun on its axis. Nick brushed a lock of hair from her eyes. The tenderness of the gesture nearly made her swoon. Actually swoon.
He kissed the tip of her nose, the corner of her mouth, the hollow of her throat.
He caught her around the waist and, with a strength she had underestimated, lifted her up. Literally swept her off her feet as he carried her to his bed. And she let him, though he now moved with agonizing slowness. A button loosened. A kiss. A brush of his fingers against her newly exposed skin. Nick moved lower and lower, no part of her body unworthy of his touch. First her collarbone. Then the upper swell of her breasts. Her ribs and the soft curve of her hips. All received the same tender, lavish attention.
“We shouldn’t be doing this,” he said.
“I know,” she said. “I don’t even like cops.”
“Teddy?”
“Yeah?”
He whispered into her ear: “Shut up.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
AT SIX O’CLOCK THE NEXT morning, while heavy drifts of fog blanketed the campus and the sun was faint on the eastern skyline, Teddy followed the path toward the dorms. She’d crept out of Nick’s room while he was still asleep. Later, she hoped to slink into her own room for a change of clothes without an inquisition from Jillian. She had returned only for Molly’s laptop. And now she was slinking into a stall of a mostly deserted bathroom on her floor.
Teddy locked the door and sat on the edge of the toilet. She balanced Molly’s computer on her lap. She tried not to think about the way Nick’s hands had felt around her waist and as they traveled down. It had been a mistake to sleep with Nick.
She plugged in the thumb drive and typed in Molly’s password: MightyQ1989. The laptop beeped: Incorrect password.
Teddy tried again and received the same result. She tried in all lowercase and then in all uppercase. Incorrect password. Had Molly somehow set her up? Acquiesced in person but created a technological obstacle? She’d been played for a fool again.
Teddy shut the laptop and trudged downstairs to Molly’s room. She wanted to bang on the door, but she couldn’t risk waking any of the other students. So she gave three slow, careful knocks. She waited a minute and did it again. At last she heard rustling from inside the room, and the door opened. Molly was in pajamas, her hair messed and her eyes barely open. “What’s wrong?” she whispered.
Teddy peered at Dara’s bed.
“She’s at the gym,” Molly said.
Teddy shut the door behind her. “You gave me the wrong password,” she said.
“What?” Molly looked confused.
“For your laptop.”
“No, I didn’t.”
“MightyQ1989,” Teddy said. “I tried it half a dozen times and couldn’t get in.”
“MightyQ1988,” Molly corrected. She held her hand out for the laptop.
Teddy hesitated. “No tricks?” Had this been Molly’s play to see what Teddy was up to? The only way to track the information? Either way, Teddy had no choice but to trust Molly now. She needed what was on that laptop. She’d come too far to turn back.
Molly held her hands up in a gesture of surrender. “No tricks.”
Molly turned the computer around, and Teddy followed the commands to access the USB drive. It worked. The home page of Molly’s computer suddenly looked like Nick’s.
Teddy scanned the names of all of Nick’s files, clicking on anything that looked like it might be related to Yates. She tsked and sighed through every click. All she learned was that Nick had eclectic tastes in music (Ray Charles, Beyoncé) and an obsession with the Golden State Warriors.
“It’s not here,” Teddy said. “The file’s not here.” She slammed the laptop closed, held her hands over her eyes. She had to think. What moves did she have left? None. And that was when she started to cry.
It wasn’t a pretty cry. It was an ugly, messy cry. The heaving, can’t-catch-your-breath, please-make-it-stop kind of cry.
“If you tell me what you’re looking for, maybe I can help,” Molly said.
“Why would you help me?” Teddy said, wiping her nose. “I blackmailed you yesterday.”
Molly sat down next to Teddy on the bed. “I’d rather not help you. But I’d also like you to leave my room at some point.” She sighed. “If there’s anything I’ve learned in my time at Whitfield, it’s that you can’t survive here on your own. Sometimes you need to ask for help. And you seem desperate. What’s on the drive?”
Teddy swallowed against a hard lump. “I’m trying to find a file.”
“Tell me. If it has to do with hidden data, I can get it.”
And so, without saying a word, Teddy passed Molly the slip of paper Yates had given her.
Molly glanced at the paper, then froze. Her eyes went wide. She stared at the alphanumeric code on the paper, then her gaze shot to Teddy. “Do you even know what this is?”
“Of course. It’s an FBI video file.”
“No. Not just an FBI video file. A highly classified file.” She shook her head. “I assumed you just wanted to see if Nick had a girlfriend he hadn’t told you about.” Suddenly, Molly was all business. It made it easier to focus on the video file instead of whatever was going on between them.
“How did you know this was Nick’s hard drive?” Teddy asked.
“Please.”
Teddy let out a breath. “Okay, number one—that’s totally insulting. Jealous snooping isn’t my style. Number two—someone told me the file would be on Nick’s laptop.”
“Someone? Teddy, do you understand what you’re messing with here?”
Teddy ignored the question. “So how do I go about finding that file? Or are you telling me it’s impossible?”
Molly bristled at that. “Nothing’s impossible. If it’s in a computer, I can get it. It’s just a question of difficulty.”
&nb
sp; “Meaning?”
“Look, I recognize that code because I’ve bumped up against similar sequences. Occasionally, agents will download highly classified files onto their personal computers, even though it’s strictly against protocol—for obvious reasons. Nick doesn’t strike me as the kind of guy who would do something like that.”
“So where are those files stored?”
“On air-gapped computers in secure federal buildings.”
“Translation?”
“Air-gapped means the physical computer isn’t connected to the Internet. It’s like a vault. In theory, these highly secure, classified files can be retrieved only by agents with security clearance.”
Teddy felt her shoulders sag. Yates had made it sound so easy. “You said in theory.”
“In theory because you need someone good.” Molly said. “But if I’m going to do this, I’ll need to know everything—how you got this, why you need it—”
“That seems unnecessary,” Teddy said.
“I can’t hack blindfolded.”
Teddy had gone all in before. But going all in at a Vegas poker table? You risked money. You risked your reputation, your ego; if you were like Teddy, you risked your parents’ house and the ire of a Russian Mob boss named Sergei. But this was going all in like she’d never done before. Molly was asking her to give everything—her past, present, future.
Teddy thought about walking out the door and forgetting the whole thing. She could go back to a life of just focusing on school. Her deal with Clint. Keep her nose clean. Get her money. But Yates had told her that her birth mother was alive and that he could help find her. And that was something she simply couldn’t walk away from.
So she told Molly the whole story, about meeting Derek Yates at San Quentin, his mental attack, his insistence on his innocence—and his claim that Clint had been involved in falsifying the evidence that got him there. She told Molly about her parents, and Sector Three, and how they and Clint and Yates had known one another at the military facility. How Yates suspected that Whitfield had been compromised by his organization—that he believed the missing blood samples were proof of it. That they shouldn’t trust everything they learned at Whitfield; that the school itself was set up for ulterior motives. When she finished, Teddy braced herself for a lecture.
Instead, Molly looked deeply troubled. She stood and paced the length of the room. At last she turned and looked at Teddy. “Retrieving that file isn’t impossible,” she said. “But it’s not something you and I can pull off on our own.”
She went on to describe the necessary steps, which would involve breaking in to an FBI building—it was a California case, so the file was likely stored locally—hacking the agency’s internal server, and downloading remote spying technology. In other words, it would be a lot harder than talking her way into a professor’s room and plugging a flash drive into a laptop.
Molly gave a decisive nod. “Here’s the bottom line: we put everything in front of the rest of the group and decide how to move forward. You need their help, too.”
Teddy let out a ragged breath. She’d just done the hardest thing of her life. Put total trust in someone else. Told her everything. And now she was going to have to do it all over again. Believe in the unseeable once more and trust four more people with all her secrets.
* * *
In Casework later that day, when Nick announced that the Misfits had solved the crime, Teddy hardly cared that the Alphas looked miserable. She had bigger things to worry about. She barely registered when Nick announced that the prize would go to Teddy as the team MVP. She had won a tour of the FBI facility in downtown San Francisco.
Dara nudged her shoulder. “Molly told me this morning that you wanted us to all meet up tonight? Your dorm room?”
“Yeah,” Teddy said, shaking off her stupor. “Tonight.” After tonight, everything would be different.
Students began to file out of the room, and Teddy grabbed her bag, but before she could leave, Nick pulled her aside. “Hold on a minute, would you, Teddy?”
Teddy’s heart lurched. She forced herself to meet Nick’s eyes—which she had studiously avoided from the moment she’d entered his class.
“You left something behind yesterday,” he said.
For a second, Teddy thought he might lean in to kiss her cheek. Instead, he lifted the manila folder containing McDonald’s forensics report. “You still need this?”
She’d left his place in such a rush that morning, she’d completely forgotten the paperwork. “Oh. Um, yes, thanks.”
He studied her. Guilt stabbed at her insides. She’d slept with Nick—one of the first guys in a long time with whom she could actually picture herself—then taken off without a word. After she’d demolished his privacy by hacking in to his hard drive.
“Everything all right, Teddy?” He lowered his voice. There was suspicion in his tone. He was, after all, an investigator. And Teddy figured there were pieces of information that weren’t adding up for him.
“I’m not a morning person,” she said. She couldn’t bear to think what might happen if Nick discovered what she had done. The kicker was that her feelings were real. She liked him. The sucker punch was that she needed the Yates file anyway.
Out of the corner of her eye, Teddy caught Ava practically falling out of her chair to eavesdrop. Nick noticed, too, and quickly changed the subject.
“We found Corey’s Bruins hat. This morning. Guess you really earned that prize.”
She didn’t feel like a winner. “Yeah, guess I did.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
ONE BY ONE THE MISFITS entered Teddy’s dorm room, until the six of them were sitting on beds and chairs and the floor. Teddy felt more nervous than she’d been that day she had bet it all at the Bellagio. Except tonight, her friends would be the ones to make the gamble. This was what it meant to ask for help. Sure, she’d technically asked for help over the last semester. Before this morning, those pleas had been transactional—each party had something to gain or to lose. But why would these people, who were relative strangers only mere months ago, risk their standing at Whitfield for her? Teddy looked around the room. They were waiting for her to speak. Her tongue felt heavy, her mouth dry.
Eventually, Jillian broke the silence. “Sorry I was held up after dinner. There was a bird I had to see about another bird. So, is this about McDonald?”
“It’s about what happened when I went to San Quentin,” Teddy said. She glanced at Molly, sitting cross-legged on Jillian’s desk. Molly nodded as if encouraging Teddy to continue.
Teddy took a deep breath. She started at the beginning: What had happened when she entered the prison. How Derek Yates had pushed into her head. How he’d told her to ask about Corey’s handwriting and ultimately pointed her to the clue about Corey’s Bruins hat. How he’d mentally influenced the correctional officers so he could meet Teddy face-to-face. How Yates had trained at Sector Three—a program that had gone disastrously awry—alongside Clint, and how they had gone their separate ways: Clint, to Whitfield, and Yates to a secret organization of psychics who assassinated world leaders. He hadn’t been too clear on the particulars of his work, but when he’d refused to kill again, they’d set him up. And then Clint had tracked him down and withheld evidence that proved Yates’s innocence.
Teddy left out the part about her parents being at Sector Three. Part of her hoped that if she presented the story without personal involvement, they’d be more inclined to help; if she sold the story without emotions, they might agree on facts alone. They should help Yates because something was happening at Whitfield. She told them that Yates believed his organization was behind the theft on Halloween. But the fact that Whitfield had their blood at all, according to Yates, suggested that the government would use psychics for secret purposes. Something about Yates’s words from that day cut her to the bone: To them, we’re weapons, to be used and discarded at will.
Jillian tucked a tangled curl behind her ear and looked
at Teddy. “Why didn’t you tell us sooner?” she asked.
“I didn’t want to involve you in this mess if I could help it.”
Dara stood up to pace the crowded room but quickly recognized the futility of even trying—the space was barely large enough to accommodate them all. She sat back down. “My grandmother was right all along about Sector Three.”
“What did you really think—the government wanted to help us develop our psychic powers, no strings attached?” Pyro asked. He let out a low laugh. “Yeah, right.”
“If that’s what you think,” Jeremy said, “then why are you here?”
“I need to learn to control my abilities,” Pyro said, slapping one palm against his chest. “But I didn’t sign up for indentured servitude.”
“So what do we do now?” Dara asked.
“We need the file Yates told me about,” Teddy said. “That’s where we start.”
Jillian blinked. “I thought you already tried. The video isn’t on Nick’s laptop, right?”
“It isn’t,” Teddy said. “But that doesn’t mean the FBI doesn’t have it.”
All eyes turned toward Molly; she seemed uncomfortable, picking at the hem of her sweater. “So, I guess we’re going to hack the FBI,” she said.
“No freaking way,” Pyro said. “Generally, I think you’re all out of your goddamn minds, but you’re really out of your goddamn mind.”
“Just listen before you make a decision,” Molly said. She spoke now with a confidence that Teddy hadn’t seen from her in weeks. Even when Teddy had been pushing her to hand over the hard drive, she’d seemed on the breaking point, but now Molly seemed focused, calm. She walked the Misfits through a rough plan. The video file resided on an air-gapped computer located somewhere within the FBI building. Extracting that file was possible only if they could get inside. They wouldn’t need physical contact with the actual computer, just proximity. With the right hacking programs and tech devices, as well as a crew stationed nearby to handle the transmissions, they could pull it off.
