My boss smiles. This is something she didn’t know before. I can tell she’s already drafting the memo in her head about there being a second man to escape the compound. It probably isn’t much, since I don’t know his name—though the way she’s smiling suggests she knows who I’m talking about—but it’s more intel than she had before I regained consciousness. That’s huge in a business that is all about the exchange of information. She gives me something in return.
“We found you in the corner of the room against the wall. You were in the fetal position, your face hidden, lying in about two pints of your own blood. You’d gone into shock.” Rogers hesitates when she says this, and for just a moment, I think maybe she actually feels something about that. About me being hurt. But then she goes back to being just my boss. “If they even saw you, I’m sure they left you for dead. Don’t worry about your cover.”
Those words make me feel better than whatever painkillers they’re pumping into me. It means I can go back into the field as soon as my leg has healed up. It means I can keep the only job I’ve ever wanted, even if I didn’t really know I wanted it until the moment Marchuk pulled his weapon on me and I thought I’d lost the job, much less everything else.
“Oh man, that’s great news, because—”
Rogers raises her hand to stop me. “Peter, given this conversation we just had, I assume you are lucid and comprehend what I’m saying?”
“Sure, boss.”
“Good, because I’d hate to say this to you if you weren’t at full mental capacity, lest you misunderstand.”
“Misunderstand?”
She leaves her chair, comes over to stand at my bedside, and looks down at me. Wow. She looks pissed. I know what she’s about to say. I’m under reprimand, I’m headed back to my computer and desk where I belong, she never should have approved me for fieldwork, I’ll be—
“You’re fired, Peter.”
CHAPTER 1
Colorado, U.S.A. | Fall Semester
It’s just after twenty-one hundred hours, and the track and field complex is deserted, but I can’t shake the feeling I’m being followed. Seven months after leaving Ukraine, I’m still not convinced people aren’t after me, but tonight my paranoia feels less irrational. Someone’s out there.
Everyone else at Carlisle Academy should be in the dorms cramming for this week’s midterms, but I’m not alone. The night is pitch black and I can’t see a thing beyond the few lights around the track, so I rely on my other senses. Still running—in case flight is a better option than fight—I tune out the drone of crickets and hear someone moving along the boxwood hedge lining the port side of the track, twenty feet away. Beneath the scent of pi?on pines in the hills above campus, I detect the pungent aroma of pizza from Buy-the-Slice. Which is in town, four point three miles from campus.
I stop running and turn toward the hedge, beyond relieved that there isn’t a Ukrainian arms dealer lying in wait behind them.
“Bunker, get out here.”
No one responds but the crickets.
“Bunk, I know it’s you. No one in his right mind would put garlic, gorgonzola, anchovies, and kimchi on a pizza.”
Sure enough, Bunker emerges from behind the bushes, a half-eaten slice in hand. For a guy who’s only five-foot-four, the man can eat. He’s always eating. But it’s understandable. He has a lot of making up to do in the food department. Well, pretty much the whole life-experiences department.
“See,” Bunk says around a mouthful of pizza, “that’s why I can never seem to get the jump on you no matter how stealthy I am.”
“Hate to break it to you, but you’re not all that stealthy,” I tell him. “Why are you here, anyway?”
“I was at the library and thought you might want a ride home. And don’t try to change the subject. There is no way you should have smelled this food from that far away,” Bunker says, stuffing the last of the pizza into his mouth. “Either you’re a dog-boy or a highly trained killing machine or a covert operative, but you are not a mere mortal.”
I try not to let Bunker’s accusations rattle me, and resume my run, hoping the fact that he is the most out-of-shape sixteen-year-old I’ve ever met will keep him from joining me. Until last year, he spent his entire life living in a bunker, hence his nickname. His dad took baby Bunk underground on New Year’s Eve 1999 and waited for the end of the world for everyone without his foresight and provision-hoarding skills. He didn’t want to give space to any gym equipment besides a full set of barbells, convinced jogging in place would be enough. It wasn’t. Bunker’s built like a five-foot-four Mr. Olympia but has the stamina of a toddler.
But he won’t let a lack of oxygen get in the way of continuing his weeklong interrogation. Bunker has been hitting me nonstop with theories about my “true identity” ever since he witnessed me kick the asses of five townies in the alley behind Buy-the-Slice. It was a regrettable display of force—especially for the townies—but necessary. I’ve sworn him to silence about the whole thing, and he’s been true to his word, except when it comes to me.
Despite the whole Joe Cool thing I’ve managed to pull off so far, the truth is, his questions are stressing me out way more than any I’ll find on a midterm exam. I barely made it out of Ukraine with my cover intact after managing to dupe Marchuk Sr. for weeks. I’d hate to have it blown by a guy who learned everything he knows about interrogation from old cop shows.
“So … I’m still not buying that story about your dad teaching you a few defensive moves,” Bunker says, already starting to pant a little. “Taking out five Crestview High football players with only a six-pack of soda for a weapon is not like fending off a mugger in the mall parking lot.”
“You helped. Some.”
“By the time I figured out what the hell was going on, you’d already knocked three of them unconscious.”
It’s October, but unseasonably warm for Colorado. I stop running for a second, peel off my sweat-drenched t-shirt, and search for a dry inch I can use to wipe my glasses, but I only make them worse. I drop the shirt on the ground next to the track and place the glasses on top of it, noticing my hands are shaking just a bit. If Bunker and his questions are making me nervous, I hate to think what kind of mess I’d be if there had been an arms-dealing terrorist behind the hedge.
“Take, for example, those specs,” Bunker says. “You think you’re pulling a Clark Kent, but you’re fooling no one.”
“I’m pulling a what?”
“Superman’s flimsy disguise? Lois Lane might be hotter, but I’m a lot more observant. There is zero prescription in those lenses.”
“Way hotter,” I say, hoping to get his focus off me and onto his favorite subject. When you grow up with only your dad for company, you miss out on a lot. Bunker lost about four years of lusting over real live girls that he will never make up for.
Unfortunately, he doesn’t take the bait.
“Despite the glasses, playing clarinet in the band, that sermon you gave me last weekend about the difference between hacking code and code-hacking, even your mad D&D skills, you are not a geek,” he says, shaking long red curls out of his face. They immediately flop back over his forehead, nearly covering his eyes, like a sheepdog’s. “In fact, your whole cover is a cliché. Nobody is that much of a nerd, even the hipsters trying hard to be nerds because it’s cool now, and I should know. Besides, real geeks don’t usually have biceps like that.”
“Um,” I say, as I point to him and back to me again. He might need one of those spray-on tans, since Bunker’s the whitest white boy I know—due to his only source of ultraviolet light since birth being a battery-operated lamp, and just enough to prevent rickets—but he would blow me away in a bodybuilding contest.
“Yeah, but I’m a freak thanks to fifteen years underground with nothing to entertain me but weights and my dad’s pre-millennium comic book and DVD collection. I’m The Thing from Fantastic Four. You, my friend, look like a boy-bander with a well-used gym membership. Big difference. A guy who looks like you cannot be oblivious that he looks like you.”
Speaking of looks, I give one to Bunker that suggests he’s given way too much thought about mine.