“Five minutes, Prettyboy.”
Marchuk just did my risk assessment for me. I shove my phone into my pocket and go for the emergency door.
CHAPTER 18
Out on the roof, from the vantage point of the door, there is no one up here but us. All I see is freedom, miles of mountains and blue sky, but no way to reach it.
“What are you doing?” Bunker shouts over the screeching of the emergency alarm.
I pull the mostly full pack of cigarettes from my pocket and stick it between the door and the jamb. “Keeping us from being locked out.”
“No, I mean, shouldn’t you be going to the office? Now you have proof—not only that Katie isn’t the hacker, but that the bad guys have her.”
“That isn’t proof she isn’t one of them.” I’ve learned it’s better—easier—to expect the worst than to be sucker punched by it. “For all I know, Marchuk’s announcement is a trap and he doesn’t really have her.”
“If it was my girl, I wouldn’t take that chance.”
When Bunker was going on about his romance a minute ago, I was too busy trying to hack Katie’s phone line to really hear what he was saying, but now his words come together like a Rubik’s cube.
“Your girl. You said she smells like flowers. Let me guess—roses and honeysuckle?”
“Um, I have no idea. But I guess she might. Those are flowers.”
“You said she asked questions about me. What kind of questions?”
“Basic stuff. But she was just trying to start a conversation, using you to get to me for a change.”
“It isn’t Katie!” I say that way too loudly, but I can’t help myself. It isn’t Katie.
“I tried to tell you.”
I’m so relieved, but I don’t have the heart to tell Bunker this time’s no different; this girl was like the others, using him to get to me.
“So shouldn’t you be rescuing her instead of hanging out on the roof?”
I look at my watch. “I still have four minutes. Your mermaid—does she have crazy-long, flaming-red fingernails?”
“So you know her!” Bunker says, smiling so big I almost hate to break it to him. “The nails are hot, right?”
“What they are is a great disguise. No one expects talons like that on someone who spends most of her waking hours on a keyboard.” Then I recall the suggestion she mouthed to me as we stood in the fire drill line. “I should have known that girl wasn’t a freshman.”
“What are you talking about?” Bunker asks.
“Don’t you see it?”
“See what?”
“The girl you’re dreaming will be your future baby mama is the same one who started the whole ‘prettyboy’ thing on Twitter—an attempt to throw me off my game, I think. A successful attempt, obviously.”
Bunker just stares at me blankly.
“You know what that makes her, right?”
I can tell from his expression that Bunker’s finally starting to get it. The guy is usually a brainiac, but like Koval said, accents can make even the smartest man stupid sometimes, even when they’re fake, and especially when they come with a pretty face and mermaid hair. More like Medusa hair than a mermaid’s, now that I know who she really is.
“No way,” he says, incredulous. “You said it was Katie.”
“Oh, so now you believe it could be Katie?”
“I do when you’re suggesting the love of my life is a terrorist hacker.”
“Well, if she’s somewhere up here with a satellite phone and an internet connection, she’ll prove me right,” I say, moving toward the four huge HVAC units, the only place on the roof to hide.
As we approach, I check my watch—just over three minutes left on the clock—and the pockets of my borrowed cargo pants for a potential weapon. Blondie may be the size of a pixie, but she may be as well-trained as I am.
Bunker watches me release the safety on the blade of the folding knife I found and asks, “Are you crazy? What if you’re wrong?”
“Trust me. I’m not.”
Sure enough, there she is, sitting on a milk crate behind the first HVAC unit we check, still wearing my Clark Kent glasses and smiling like she still thinks this is all one big game. Bunker, on the other hand, looks like he’s about to be sick. She waves at him as though she has no clue she’s just ripped out his heart and stomped all over it.
“Hey there, Bunker,” she says with an English accent.
Bunker says nothing.
“Let me see your hands,” I yell at her.
“I’m not armed. Marchuk would never allow that. He’d worry I’d come after him.”
“Why would you do that if you’re working for him?” I ask.
“Only against my will.”
“You expect me to believe that?” I ask as I grab the computer off her lap.
“I don’t care what you believe. It’s the truth. He forced me to manage the school’s security system so he could grab you. It was only supposed to be about you—no lockdown, no one else in danger—just take you out of your chemistry class and go. But you weren’t there. If anyone’s to blame for the mess it’s become, it’s you.”
“Maybe she’s right.” When Bunker finally speaks, I don’t like what he has to say, especially when I only have two and a half minutes to reach Katie. “Maybe we should listen—”
“I don’t have time to listen,” I say, handing the knife to Bunker. “Stand up.”
I’m surprised when she does as I order, but unlike Bunk, I’m not trusting her they-made-me-do-it story, especially since her accent has slowly morphed into a mix of BBC and something I can’t pinpoint, maybe Eastern European. I skip the formality of asking her permission before I pat her down, looking for weapons.
“Where’s your phone?” I ask after finding no weapons on her.
“What phone?”
“I know you’ve got a satellite phone up here somewhere.”
The minute I step back from her, she reaches down the front of her shirt—the one place I was too much of a gentleman to check—pulls out the smallest sat phone I’ve ever seen, and throws it over my head, a good fifty feet behind me, and off the roof. I hear the tiny splash it makes when it hits the koi pond in the courtyard. Okay, seventy feet.
“Oh, you meant that phone.”
Wow. She’s a pretty decent hacker who actually does look like Hollywood’s version of a mermaid and has an arm like an MLB pitcher. I can see why Bunker might lose his damn mind after only two conversations with her—if she wasn’t a terrorist bent on seeing me dead.
“Sorry, but if Marchuk found out I gave you access to the outside world, he’d kill me,” she says. “You’ll have to get us out of this without my help.”
“There is no ‘us’ here. You’re one of the bad guys. We aren’t. Right, Bunk?”
He doesn’t say anything.
“Bunk?”
“Yeah?”
“Are you going to be okay?” I ask, not sure I’ll believe his answer either way. But I don’t have a choice. Katie needs me. “Blondie here needs to be contained, but I have to get down to the office. Like, stat.”
“You really do. You’re under two minutes now, and Marchuk’s threats are never idle. I should know.” The way she says that last line and looks at me with pleading eyes is probably meant to convince us she’s a victim in all this, but I’m not buying it.
I’m not so sure about Bunker.
He finally wakes from the dead and says, “Yes, I can handle it. But not with this. I don’t want that.”
I take the knife but trade him the small canister of pepper spray I found in one of my pockets. Bunker waves it off.
“Look at her, Peter. She’s barely five feet and weighs, like, ninety pounds.”
“But you can’t—”
“Let my guard down, I know. I figured you out, didn’t I?”
“You’re sure, Bunk?” I ask, hoping he is, because now that I know Katie isn’t the hacker, she’s back to being the first girl I ever really cared about. I’m now under ninety seconds.
“Yeah, man. I got this. You go help Katie.”
“No fireworks and ice cream, right? And definitely no mermaids.”
“What’s he talking about?” Blondie asks.
“No mermaids,” Bunker says, taking the pepper spray to prove he means it.