That wasn’t the kind of help I was offering, but since she now has both of Marchuk’s arms behind him, I figure she may not need it anyway. I didn’t see this playing out with Katie saving the day instead of me. She must have taken a self-defense class. From the looks of it, she must have been the best in her class there, too.
When she reaches up to take her bag, which must weigh about twenty pounds, I realize what I’d been smelling on her. Not woodsmoke and not tar, but creosote, which smells like a combination of both and is used to treat railroad ties, which is what the fake groundskeeper likes to bench-press.
“So you weren’t lying when you said you took those clothes off a bad guy,” I say, sounding a little stupid. More like a little stupefied. Okay—a lot stupefied.
“Maybe that concussion is worse than we thought,” Katie says. “Why would I lie about something like that?”
“Okay, not lie, but I thought you were making a joke.”
“Why would I make jokes at a time like this?”
“Maybe to lighten the mood?” Like right now. This mood could definitely stand some lightening. I suppose people handle stressful situations differently. I like a little humor. Katie gets more serious than death. Maybe because Marchuk is beginning to recover from the ball-kick she gave him and is starting to squirm. She still doesn’t ask for my help, though.
“I mean—how?”
“How what?” she has the nerve to ask, at the same time she grabs Marchuk’s hair and slams his face into the floor, knocking him out.
“How the clothes? How the smoke bomb? How the … what you just did to Marchuk there?”
“So many questions, Peter.”
“Well, the clothes I figured out. They’re a couple sizes too big and smell like creosote, so I’m guessing you took them from the groundskeeper.”
She sniffs her sleeve. “Really? That is one keen sense of smell you have there.”
“Yeah, it’s a gift. I assume that guy was outside the building acting as a lookout.”
“You assumed right. At least, I think that was supposed to be his job, though I found him inside.”
“Not such a great lookout if he got himself trapped inside after the building was locked down.”
“I suppose. But he had that just-came-in-from-outside smell.” She looks up at me and smiles. “Hey, who has the nose now?”
Why is she acting like restraining the man who was about to kill me is all in a day’s work? Unless … it actually is.
“He is a groundskeeper. Maybe he always has that smell,” Katie says. “Anyway, I’ve seen him checking me out before, so I was able to lure him into one of the stairwells, knock him unconscious, and take his clothes,” she says, clearly skipping some important details, like how she could possibly knock out a guy who lifts railroad ties like they’re nothing. Or where she left him, because I didn’t see an unconscious groundskeeper in any stairwell.
From the bag she pulls a pencil case. I’ve seen it before and thought it had to be the only pencil case in all of Carlisle, as much a relic as Bunker’s brick-phone walkie-talkies. I always figured it was a British thing. Katie digs around in the case like we’ve got time to select the perfect writing utensil, all the while sitting on top of a twitching Marchuk, until she finally selects a red fountain pen. Except it isn’t. She pulls the pen apart and reveals an already-filled hypodermic needle. She plunges it into Marchuk’s neck.
“And I don’t lie,” she continues as though all that didn’t just happen, while patiently waiting for Marchuk’s twitching to stop. “Well, of course I lie. It’s what we do, isn’t it? But I didn’t lie about that.”
“So … what about the groundskeeper?”
“Oh, I just gave him a little carfentanil, zip-tied him, and dragged him into the nearest closet. That took forever. He’s small, but all muscle.”
“Carfentanil?”
She holds up the needle she just pulled from Junior’s neck.
“It’s ten thousand times stronger than morphine, so it acts quickly, and it only takes a drop or two. Vets use it to sedate elephants,” she explains, finally getting off of the now-unconscious Marchuk. Or possibly dead Marchuk. “Which makes two down and I’m not sure how many to go, unfortunately.”
“By my count there are six altogether, but four down,” I say, finally glad to add something to the script. “Bunker and I took out two more. Duke Duncan’s with them in the chem lab, making sure they stay that way.”
Or at least I hope that was him who just checked in with Marchuk.
“Excellent! Just two more, then. We need to stay on task and complete this mission.” She slings her purse—though I suspect it’s more than a purse—across her body and heads toward the door. When I don’t follow, she turns back to me.
“Unless you don’t want to help?”
I’m still in a daze, and it doesn’t have anything to do with my possible concussion or the smoke bomb Katie just happened to have on her.
“I’m trying to figure out what the hell you know about a mission.”
She narrows her eyes at me like she’s trying to decide how much she wants to tell me. Or how truthful she wants to be about it. “I may have left out a few facts when I told you about myself over dinner that one time.”
“So when you said lying is ‘what we do,’ did you mean—”
“Of course that’s what I meant. They have girl spies too, you know. And speaking of facts, you left out a few yourself. The CIA. My word.”
“But I … I mean…”
“No time for that now. I have a job to do.”
“What job?”
“Let’s just say I need to make sure a package is secure.”
Her answer surprises me, mostly because I didn’t expect her to give me one. Yeah, it’s pretty vague, but it’s more than I knew about her thirty seconds ago. The fact that Marchuk said the same thing when he was listing Koval’s duties means I still don’t know nearly enough about Katie.
“Stay here and babysit Marchuk if you want, not that he’s going anywhere anytime soon.”
“Are you sure you didn’t kill him? You used elephant tranquilizer.”
“No need for that messiness. Besides, there wasn’t enough tranquilizer left to kill him—I need to ration it. But he’ll be down for hours, and by then, we’ll have neutralized the remaining two and evacuated the school.”
If you count the hacker, there are actually three remaining, but I figure I should hold back as much information as I can until I can learn as much about her mission as possible. She heard me mention the hacker, but I assume Katie has no idea she’s in the building, or what her role is in this current operation.
“So you agree, those are our priorities—neutralize and evacuate—in that order?”
Katie hesitates a second too long before she agrees with me, and now that I know she’s an operative, I read something into that hesitation. I store the clue for later, and actually smile when I think about solving the mystery that is Katie.
“Good. Andrews is supposed to be in the auditorium guarding the office staff, but we’ll have to track down Koval.”
“He could be anywhere,” she suggests, sounding defeated, like we might as well not even look for him. Her response doesn’t quite match the Katie I’ve witnessed over the last few minutes.
“Marchuk said he gave Koval three jobs: watching the other men, watching the soft targets, who should all be locked down in their classrooms, and ‘making sure package is secure until other package arrives safely.’ Koval must be somewhere working on that task. You don’t think one of these packages is yours, do you?”
“Why would I?” Katie answers casually, just as a trained operative would if she were hiding something.
I know why I’m here—to track the hacker. I know why Marchuk is here—to kill me. Or at least, I thought that was his only reason, until all his talk about the packages.
Now it seems he had another plan to execute once he finished executing me.
What I don’t know is why Katie is here. She isn’t going to just tell me, so my best bet is to play along until I gain her trust. Or until I have to force her to tell me.